2018-19 Annual Reports

Technical Committees represent thirteen different areas of acoustics in the Society. Appointments to the Technical Committees take place in January. Members who are interested in being appointed to a technical committee should send a message to  asa@acousticalsociety.org.

Acoustical Oceanography (AO)
Animal Bioacoustics (AB)
Architectural Acoustics (AA)
Biomedical Acoustics (BA)
Engineering Acoustics (EA)
Computational Acoustics (Technical Specialty Group) (CA)
Musical Acoustics (MU)
Noise (NS)
Physical Acoustics (PA)
Psychological and Physiological Acoustics (PP)
Signal Processing in Acoustics (SP)
Speech Communication (SC)
Structural Acoustics and Vibration (SA)
Underwater Acoustics (UW)

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Acoustical Oceanography

This annual report reviews activities of the Technical Committee on Acoustical Oceanography (TCAO) for the 176th and 177th meetings of Acoustical Society of America (ASA) in Victoria, British Colombia and in Louisville, Kentucky. The AOTC enjoyed a wonderfully productive and eventful year where most of our activities centered around the Fall Victoria meeting, and laying the ground work for an extensive program at the 178th meeting in San Diego.

In Victoria there were four extremely productive special sessions on the topics of 1) Ocean observatories, 2) Arctic acoustics, 3) Sound propagation in sediments, and 4) Machine learning and data science. While more modest in scope the Louisville meeting hosted one important and pithy special session addressing future and emerging areas in acoustical oceanography. These special sessions included over 20 student papers and over a dozen invited speakers. Four prize winning student papers were Elizabeth Frances Weidner, with her paper entitled “Broadband acoustic observations of individual naturally occurring hydrate-coated bubbles in the Gulf of Mexico’’; Emma Reeves Ozanich, with “Ocean acoustic range estimation in noisy environments using convolutional networks’’; Luis Donoso, with “Low frequency acoustical scattering from dynamic schools of swim bladder fish’’; and Athanasios G Athanassiadis, with “The sound of light: towards ocean acoustic sensing with an optical breakdown transducer’’. I thank all my skilled session organizers for their successful planning and execution of their sessions.

Over the year there were also several noteworthy achievements of AO members that warrant mention.  First, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Senior Scientist and 2017 recipient of the Walter Munk Award, Dr. Andone Lavery was elected President of the Oceanography Society. This academic society was founded in 1988 with the goals to advance oceanographic research, technology, and education, and to disseminate knowledge of oceanography and its application through research and education and it is one of the premier ocean science societies in the world. Next AO scientist Stan Dosso of the University of Victoria was elected vice president of the Acoustical society, and lastly Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s researcher Peter Gerstoft had his work featured in an amusing Steven Colbert monologue entitled “There's A Weird Noise Coming from An Antarctic Ice Shelf’’.

Lastly, I mention some changing of the guard within AO.  Our student representative Matthew Zeh will hand the baton to Elizabeth Weidner and the new AO medals and awards representative will be Martin Siderius of Portland State University who takes over for Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher Grant Deane. Martin’s leadership will be critical in the coming three years as the TC will be able to offer the AO silver medal starting in 2020. Finally of upmost importance, Grant Deane will be stepping into the AO chairpersonship starting at the San Diego meeting. I am confident that the TC will continue to flourish under this new leadership. I want to thank everyone in the TC for all the great efforts they have put forth over my tenure at AO chair in creating an energetic and dynamic atmosphere in AO and the greater society as a whole. We look forward to productive and exciting years ahead.

John A. Colosi
Chair, 2016–2019

Acoustical Oceanography website

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Animal Bioacoustics

This report covers activities of the Technical Committee on Animal Bioacoustics (TCAB) from May 2018 to May 2019, including the two ASA meetings in Victoria (joint meeting with the Canadian Acoustical Association, November 2018) and Louisville (May 2019).  Victoria was my first meeting as Chair of TCAB.  We currently have an active group of 59 members and several of those individuals generously volunteer their time to represent TCAB.

In Victoria, TCAB sponsored four special sessions: “Passive acoustic density estimation: Recent advances and outcomes for terrestrial and marine species,” “Combining passive and active acoustics for ecological investigations,” “Anything you can do I can do better: Bat versus dolphin biosonar,” and “Fish and marine invertebrate bioacoustics,” in addition to four other general topic sessions.  The first TCAB short course on “Bioacoustics and Ecoacoustics” was also a success at the Victoria meeting.  TCAB offers awards for Best Paper in Animal Bioacoustics at each meeting.  Twenty-seven entries resulted in some stiff competition for this award at the Victoria meeting.  Mikala Epp won first prize for “Investigation of the context of humpback whale non-song calls in the North Atlantic,” and Youenn Jezequel won second prize for “Buzzing sounds used as a mean of intra-specific interaction during agonistic encounters in male European lobsters (Homarus gammarus).”

In Louisville, two special sessions in AB were: “Bioinspiration and biomimetics in acoustics,” and “Understanding animal song,” along with general topic sessions and a poster session.  TCAB received twenty-five entries for Best Paper in AB at the Louisville meeting and awarded best oral presentation to Anastasiya Kobrina for, “The effects of age and sex on rates of hearing loss for pure tones varying in duration,” and best poster presentation to Jay Schwartz for, “What is a scream? Acoustic characteristics of a human call type.”  Congratulations to the winners and a big thanks to those who evaluated presentations for Best Paper in Victoria and Louisville.

In terms of Animal Bioacoustics Technical initiatives for 2018-2019, the ASA generously supported the 2nd Oceanoise Asia Symposium, Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life Conference, DCLDE Workshop, the 1st African Bioacoustics Conference, NE Regional Environmental Acoustics Symposium, the SUNY Summer Short Course, and the IQOE Workshop on Ocean Sound Monitoring Standards.

Animal Bioacoustics TC is actively involved in the development of acoustic standards.  Currently, there are working groups on the Effects of Sound on Fish and Turtles; Towed Array Passive Acoustic Operations for Bioacoustic Applications; Description and Measurement of the Ambient Sound in Parks, Wilderness Areas, and Other Quiet and/or Pristine Areas; Noise and Vibration in Animal Laboratory Facilities; Auditory Evoked Potential Testing of Toothed Whale Hearing; and Acoustic Metadata for Passive Acoustic Monitoring. Everybody is welcome to join working groups and actively participate.

A huge thank you to all the members of TCAB for their support and involvement in the various activities of the ASA.

Marla Holt
Chair, 2018-2021

Animal Bioacoustics website

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Architectural Acoustics

The Technical Committee on Architectural Acoustics is active and healthy, with more than 250 members and strong engagement at ASA national and regional meetings throughout the year.

Leadership
Eric Reuter finished his term as Chair after the Louisville meeting.
A significant initiative was undertaken after the Victoria meeting to change the way TCAA elects its leadership. Traditionally, only one candidate was selected by the nominating committee, and run against the current Secretary, with voting done at the corresponding spring meeting by those present. This was out of sync with the procedures of the other Technical Committees.
Under our new procedures, the Nominating Committee will select two candidates for the position of Chair-Elect. The Chair-Elect will serve the duties of Secretary for three years, and subsequently serve as Chair for three years. Balloting is now electronic, engaging all eligible members of the Committee.
To facilitate the transition, we held one-time simultaneous elections for Chair and Chair-Elect.
The Chair for the 2019-2022 term is Ana Jaramillo. The Chair-Elect is David Woolworth.

Meetings
Victoria – TCAA sponsored 9 special sessions with 96 papers presented. Our open committee meeting was held on Tuesday, November 6, 2018 with approximately 66 in attendance.
Louisville – TCAA sponsored 7 special sessions with 64 papers presented. Our open committee meeting was held on Tuesday, May 14, 2019 with 94 in attendance.
Medals and Awards
The Gold Medal was awarded to Bill Cavanaugh at the Louisville meeting.
The Wallace Clement Sabine Medal was awarded to Michael Vorländer at the Victoria meeting.
David Woolworth because an ASA Fellow at the Victoria meeting.
Student Paper Awards
At each meeting, TCAA awards prizes for the best student papers. We congratulate the following winners from the past year:
Victoria Meeting
1st Place: Daniel Tay, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
“High spatial resolution scanning for experimental room-acoustic measurements in scale models”
2nd Place: Anna Catton, University of Nebraska Lincoln
“How physical versus panned sources in dry or reverberant conditions affect accuracy of localization in sound field synthesis systems”
Louisville Meeting
1st Place: Matthew Neal, Penn State
“The room impulse response in time, frequency, and space: mapping spatial energy using spherical array beamforming techniques”
2nd Place: Byeongho Jo, KAIST
” Nonsingular EB-ESPRIT for the localization of early reflections in a room”

Eric Reuter
Chair, 2016-2019

Architectural Acoustics website

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Biomedical Acoustics

This annual report summarizes the activities within the Biomedical Acoustics TC during the Minnesota meeting (Spring 2018) and through the Louisville meeting (Spring 2018) and including the Victoria meeting (Fall 2018).

The 175th ASA meeting was held in Minnesota, MN. The four special sessions were “Using acoustic wave propagation to estimate quantitative material properties of tissue” by Matthew Urban, “Induction Mechanisms for Bubble Nucleation” by Brian Fowlkes and Ron Roy, “Transcranial Focused Ultrasound for Targeted Brain Therapies” by Emad Ebbini, and “Acoustic imaging of small vessels and low speed flow” by Mahdi Bayat. We had an eventful BATC meeting where we discussed several ASA initiatives including an upcoming Strategic Plan meeting, ASA-Government Relations Improvement, a new cross-discipline Computational Acoustics Technical Specialty Group, and better acoustics outreach. Our BA technical initiative to conduct a FOCUS workshop by Robert McGough was approved by TC for the Louisville meeting. We had an outstanding student poster competition in Minnesota. This poster competition was organized and coordinated by Kevin Haworth. Congratulations to the Winners:  Tho N.H.T. Tran (3rd Place), Parker O’Brien (2nd Place), Dezhuang Ye (1st Place)! Many thanks to the poster judges in Minnesota: Hong Chen, Max Denis, Tim Doyle, Jim Lacefield, Brian Tracey and Matt Urban. We also had the privilege of congratulating Kenneth Suslick for receiving the Helmholtz-Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal in Physical and Biomedical Acoustics, Vic Sparrow who was elected President-Elect and Tyrone Porter who was elected to Executive Council.

The 176th ASA meeting was held in beautiful Victoria, BC. The six special sessions were “The state of the art in lung ultrasound, past, present and future” organized by Libertario Demi and Martin Verweij, “Bubble Trouble in Therapeutic Ultrasound”  organized by Christy Holland and Klazina Kooiman, “Targeted Drug Delivery – Acoustic Radiation Force” organized John Allen and Alfred Yu, “Shock waves and ultrasound for calculus fragmentation” organized by Juliana Simon and Michael Bailey, “Therapeutic ultrasound transducers” organized by Adam Maxwell and Tatiana Khokhlova, and “Wave propagation in complex media: from theory to applications” organized by Guillaume Haiat and Pierre Belanger. The BATC meeting on Wednesday evening was also eventful where we discussed a future change to the remote presentation policy, upcoming surveys, and outreach to industry. Congratulations to two new BA Fellows: Eleanor P. Stride for contributions to the modelling, development, and manufacturing of acoustically responsive biomaterials and Ahmed A. Al-Jumaily for contributions to biomedical applications of acoustics and vibrations.

The 177th ASA meeting was held in Louisville, KY. The four special sessions were “Cardiovascular Ultrasound: Imaging and Therapy” organized by Kevin Haworth and Jonathan Kopacheck, “Lung ultrasound and tissue stiffness method” organized by Xiaoming Zhang and Libertario Demi, “Interaction of light and ultrasound” organized Carr Everbach and Ron Roy, and “Inverse Problems in Biomedical Ultrasound” organized by Doug Mast. Robert McGough conducted the first BA modeling workshop and it was a huge success with nearly 50 attendees and great feedback! The BATC meeting on Wednesday evening was very well-attended (over 50 new and continuing members) where we discussed a JASA Special Issue initiative (Reflections) and the Strategic Summit Results and related Champions meeting where the four task groups would be formed. We had another outstanding student poster competition in Louisville. This poster competition was organized and coordinated by Kevin Haworth. Congratulations to the Winners: (1st) Billy Y.S. Yiu (2aBA2): Live color encoded speckle imaging platform for real time complex flow visualization in vivo, (2nd) Frederick William Damen, 2aBA5: Spatial analysis of cardiac strain using high frequency four dimensional ultrasound in mice, (3rd) Joseph Majdi, 5aBA3: Tissue Doppler Imaging To Detect Muscle Fatigue! Many thanks to the poster judges: Bob McGough, Julianna Simon, Mike Bailey, Jim McAteer, Kang Kim, Marie Muller, Christy Holland, Jonathan Kopechek, Alfred Yu, Costas Arvanitis, Paul Barbone, Larry Crum, Libertario Demi, and Viktor Bollen. Congratulations to Adam Maxwell for receiving the R. Bruce Lindsay Award!

The efforts of everyone who contributed to the Biomedical Acoustics Technical Committee this past year are gratefully acknowledged. This includes, but is not limited to, incoming and outgoing BATC representatives on committees (Medals and Awards, Membership, and ASACOS – Jeff Ketterling, Tom Matula Wayne Kreider, respectively) for the Acoustical Society, Associate Editors, special session organizers, session chairs, the student council representative, poster session judges, and the poster session organizer. The Associate Editors of JASA and JASA-EL for BA related areas are W. W. L. Au, C. C. Church, R. R. Fay, J. J. Finneran, M. C. Hastings, G. Hatıat, D. K. Mellinger, D. L. Miller, A. N. Popper, T. J. Royston, A. M. Simmons, C. E. Taylor, K. A. Wear, and Suk Wang Yoon. Timothy G. Leighton is the BA editor for POMA. Many thanks to Kang Kim, Siddhartha Sikar for representing BA on the TPOM sessions for these meetings and to our new student council representative, Asis Lopez. I would also like to thank everyone else who contributed to or participated in Biomedical Acoustics activities during the past year.

Hope to see you in San Diego.

Subha Maruvada
Chair, 2017–2020

Biomedical Acoustics website

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Computational Acoustics (Technical Specialty Group)

This report summarizes activities of the Computational Acoustics Technical Specialty Group following the Minneapolis meeting (Spring 2018), to include the Victoria (Fall 2018) and Louisville (Spring 2019) meetings. The formation of the CA TSG was approved at the Minneapolis meeting. It provides a forum for researchers interested in numerical methods, optimization of calculations, benchmarking, and practical application of models. Additional information on the formation and purpose of the TSG can be found in the Acoustics Today “Sound Perspectives” article (https://acousticstoday.org/technical-specialty-group-report-computational-acoustics-d-keith-wilson/).

The CA TSG kicked off with its first official meeting in Victoria. There were 31 participants. Although the CA TSG had been formed too recently to plan its own special sessions for Victoria, there were many computationally related sessions at this meeting, including “Challenges in Computational Acoustics”, which was sponsored by PA and joint with AA, Noise, SP, and UA. It was organized by Matthew Blevins and myself.

At the 177th Meeting in Louisville, the CA TSG held its first special session, “Finite Difference Time Domain Method Across Acoustics”, which was jointly sponsored by BA, PA, UA, SP, and SAV, and organized by Michelle Swearingen, Jennifer Cooper, and Subha Maruvada. The TSG also jointly sponsored the UA session on “Uncertainty in Propagation Prediction.” I made a presentation in the Interdisciplinary Hot Topics session, on “Hot Topics in Computational Acoustics.” The second official TSG meeting was held in Louisville, with 30 participants.

With the formation of the CA TSG, JASA now also has a Computational Acoustics section, for which Nail A. Gumerov, Ying-Tsong Lin, and Nickolas Vlahopoulos serve as the Associate Editors. Vlahopoulos and myself are the AEs for JASA Express Letters.

Jennifer Cooper volunteered to serve as the CA TPOM representative starting with the San Diego (Fall 2019) meeting. The TSG plans to initiate a Young Presenter award starting with the Chicago (Spring 2020) meeting.

D. Keith Wilson
Chair, 2018–2021

Computational Acoustics website

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Engineering Acoustics

This annual report reviews the efforts in Engineering Acoustics (EA) from between May 2018 and May 2019. The information in this report is inclusive of the 176th meeting in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada on 5-9 November 2018, to the 177th meeting in Louisville, Kentucky held 13-17 May 2019.  In that time span, the members and contributors to the Technical Committee on Engineering Acoustics (TCEA) published 41 full-length articles in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America under the category of Engineering Acoustics.

TCEA sponsored sessions in the 176th Meeting included one special session and two ad hoc sessions. The special session (3pEA) was entitled “Acoustic particle velocity sensors, algorithms, and applications in air,” which was chaired by M. Scanlon and co-sponsored by the Technical Committee on Noise (TCNS). The two ad hoc sessions were “Transducer Characterization” (1pEAa) and “General Topics in Engineering Acoustics,” (1pEAb), both chaired by C. Sieck. The best student paper award was given to In-Jee Jung from the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Korean Advanced Institute of Technology (KAIST) for the presentation “Estimation of the source distance using the multiple three-dimensional acoustic intensimetry,” (3pEA4). The TCEA meeting took place at 16:30 on 6 November 2018. The primary topics of discussion included a renewed push to organize special sessions sponsored or co-sponsored by TCEA, a solicitation by the Publication Policy Committee to have TCEA members participate as media contacts for inquiries germane to EA, and increasing industry participation at ASA meetings. Details of that meeting were provided in the meeting minutes prepared by the TCEA chair.

TCEA sponsored sessions in the 177th Meeting included two ad hoc sessions: “General Topics in Engineering Acoustics: Sensors and Sources,” (4aEA) and “General Topics in Engineering Acoustics: Characterization and Measurement,” (4pEA), both chaired by M. Guild and M. Haberman. The TC also co-sponsored five additional sessions: i) “Reconfigurable Arrays for Adaptive Wave Guiding” (1aSP, co-sponsors: EA, PA, UW, SA) chaired by R. Harne and J. Rogers, ii) “Acoustofluidics I” (3aPA, co-sponsors: EA, BA), chaired by M. Denis, K. Chitale, and C. Thompson, iii) “Acoustofluidics II” (3pPA, co-sponsors: EA, BA), chaired by M. Denis, K. Chital, and C. Thompson, iv) “Noise and Vibration in Rotating Machinery” (3aSAb, co-sponsored by EA, NS), chaired by B. Koch, E. Magliula, and v) “Novel Damping Treatments” (3pSA, co-sponsored by EA, NS, AA), chaired by B. Shafer, B. Beck, H. Hall. Unfortunately, no best student paper award was given as no entries were received. The TCEA meeting took place at 16:30 on 14 May 2019. The primary topics of discussion included the organization of special sessions for upcoming ASA meetings, potential site visits to microphone companies in the Chicago area during the upcoming 179th meeting (of which there are many), a request by JASA EIC to provide a list of seminal JASA papers in the area of EA for an upcoming monthly feature called “Reflections” that will be published in anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the ASA, and the existence of new headings in JASA: “Computational Acoustics,” and “Acoustical Standards and Practice.” Details of that meeting were provided in the meeting minutes prepared by the TCEA chair. Results of the ASA Strategic Summit held in Tucson, AZ in January 2019 and the attendant Strategic Initiatives were conveyed to the meeting attendees. Finally, attendees were encouraged to become a member of the ASA and to recruit others to become members.

Michael Haberman
Chair, 2018 – 2021

Engineering Acoustics website

 

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Musical Acoustics

During 2018-2019 the Technical Committee on Musical Acoustics (TCMU) was chaired by Andrew Morrison. The representatives to the Society committees were: James P. Cottingham, Medals and Awards; Andrew Morrison, Committee on Standards; James Beauchamp and Thomas Moore, Membership; and Eric Rockni, Student Council. Associate editors of the society publications for the area of musical acoustics were Thomas Moore, Andrew Morrison, Tamara Smyth, and Joe Wolf (JASA); D. Murray Campbell, and Thomas Moore (JASA Express Letters); and Randy Worland (POMA). The Technical Program Organizing Committee (TPOM) representatives for the two meetings of the ASA were Whitney Coyle and Péter Rucz. Robert W. Pyle, Jr. was recognized as an ASA Fellow for contributions to the understanding of the acoustics of brass musical instruments. Those appointed or reappointed as TCMU members during the year were: Edgar J. Berdahl, Judith C. Brown, Vasileios Chatziioannou, Thomas M. Huber, Christopher M. Jasinski, Wilfried Kausel, Bozena Kostek, Timothy W. Leishman, Daniel O. Ludwigsen, Andrew N. Miller, Robert Mores, Thomas D. Rossing, Daniel A. Russell, David B. Sharp, Julius O. Smith, William J. Strong, and Joe Wolfe.

At the 176th meeting of the ASA in Victoria, B.C., November 5-9, 2018, the TCMU sponsored three special sessions and one general session. The three special sessions were: Modeling Musical Instruments and Effects (Scott Hawley and Vasileios Chatziioannou, co-chairs), Computational and experimental investigations of flow in musical instruments (Whitney Coyle, chair), Percussion Instruments (Andrew Morrison and Uwe Hansen, co-chairs).

Winners of the award for best student papers were Iran Sanadzadeh, Timothy Greer, and Jack D. Gabriel.

At the 177th ASA meeting in Louisville, KY, May 13-17, 2019, the TCMU sponsored one general and three special sessions. The special sessions were: Bluegrass music and related instruments (Whitney Coyle, chair), Transient Effects of Wind Instruments (Vasileios Chatziioannou, chair), Polyphonic Pitch Perception and Analysis (Jonas Braasch and Torben Pastore, co-chairs)

TCMU proposed a technical initiative for a concert at Louisville in order to host a concert performed by a local bluegrass band in coordination with the Bluegrass music and related instruments session. This concert was well attended by a wide cross-section of the ASA membership.  Additionally, Thom Moore taught a Short Course at the Louisville meeting on Electronic Speckle Pattern Interferometry.

Montserrat Pàmies-Vilà and Jade Case won the awards for Best Student Papers.

James Cottingham continues to maintain an excellent website for TCMU, which can be accessed at http://tcmuasa.org/. It includes links to future meetings, minutes of previous TCMU meetings, annual reports, student paper award winners, and useful links to teaching websites and musical acousticians.

Andrew C.H. Morrison
Chair, 2014-2019

Musical Acoustics website

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Noise

As of the May 2018 meeting in Minneapolis I began my term as Chair for the Technical Committee for Noise.  Many thanks to the past Chair, William J. Murphy, for his excellent leadership and enthusiasm the previous three years, as well as his continued assistance as I take over as Chair. Shortly after starting my term, Kieren Smith, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in Architectural Engineering Acoustics at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was selected among several candidates to act as the Student Council representative for TCNS.  Her time as our representative was short as she was soon elected to Student Council Chair.  However, her efficient and excellent support through the meetings in Victoria (November 2018) and Louisville (May 2019) was greatly appreciated.  Her replacement is Aaron Vaughn, a physics graduate student at Brigham Young University.  I welcome Aaron to the position and look forward to working with him in the future.

It has been a difficult year as we have seen the passing of several outstanding, long-time members of our committee.  In no particular order: Angelo Campanella, Jiri Tichy, Richard Lyon, William Thornton, Larry Royster, and very recently William Cavanaugh; the latter of whom had just been honored as the 2019 recipient of the Gold Medal of the Acoustical Society of America at the Louisville meeting.  The contributions to the Society, the field of acoustics, and the world in general that these people have made are too vast for words.  They will be greatly missed by our members.

During 2018-19, the membership of the Technical Committee on Noise continues to be active in the Society and been honored to serve. David Woolworth was honored as Fellow in May 2018.  Bennett Brooks was elected to the Executive Council.  Scott Sommerfeldt was succeeded by Peggy Nelson as Vice President while Victor Sparrow succeeded Lily Wang as President of the Society.  All have been active within TCNS through chairing sessions and helping to organize recent meetings.

TCNS has promoted the development of upcoming talent.  This year marks the fourth year of the Leo and Gabriela Beranek Scholarship in Architectural Acoustics and Noise Control.  This year’s recipient is Kevin Leete who is pursuing his Ph.D. in Physics and Astronomy/Physics at Brigham Young University. TCNS member Kent Gee is Kevin’s advisor.  Kevin received his undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University in the same field.  In addition, this year is the third year for the Virginia and Frank Winker Memorial Scholarship for Graduate Study in Acoustics.  This year’s recipient is Colby Cushing who is pursuing a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at University of Texas at Austin.  Colby is a graduate of the Pennsylvania State University, having earned his Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering.  I encourage faculty at all universities to encourage students to apply for these two scholarships.  I, along with the other members of the Beranek scholarship committee (Eric Reuter (TCAA Chair), Tony Hoover, Alex Case, Carl Rosenberg) and the Winker scholarship committee (Christopher Struck (ASA Standards Director), Eric Reuter (TCAA Chair), Gary Elko (alternate for Michael Haberman, Chair TCEA, who recused himself as an advisor for one of the applicants), and Daniel Russell have been privileged to review the applications of the students.

TCNS has honored several Young Investigators for the excellent papers that they have presented at the Victoria and Louisville meetings.  In Victoria, three papers were honored for the Young Investigator Awards: Kristi M. Ward for “Investigating individual susceptibility to the detrimental effects of background noise and reverberation in simulated complex acoustic environments,” Sarah E. Yoho for “Relationship between perception of speech in noise and disordered speech: Influence of sensorineural hearing loss,” and Seonghun Im for “Characterization of laptop computer noise and vibration using nearfield acoustic holography.”  In Louisville, the following three papers were honored for the Young Investigator Awards:   Mylan R. Cook for “Improved automated classification of basketball crowd noise,” Jonathan R Weber for “Quiet time impacts on the neonatal intensive care unit soundscape and patient outcomes,” and Gregory Scott Farber for “Soundprint and the ASA's International Noise Awareness Day campaign – results, what worked, and going forward.”  Congratulations to each of these young investigators.

The 176th meeting of the ASA was held in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada (joint with 2018 Acoustics Week in Canada) with 7 TCNS-led sessions (two of them with two parts) and 86 papers presented.  William Murphy, Hales Swift, and Kerrie Standlee served as the TPOM representatives.  The 177th meeting of the ASA was held in Louisville, KY.  At this meeting, 57 papers were presented in seven noise-led sessions.  William Murphy, Hales Swift, and Kerrie Standlee also served as the TPOM representatives for the Louisville meeting.  At both meetings, numerous other sessions were co-sponsored by TCNS.

Thanks to following people who have represented TCNS within the ASA during this time:  Brigitte Schulte-Fortkamp on the Medals and Awards Committee, Alex Case on the Membership Committee, Kieren Smith on Student Council, Rich Peppin on ASACOS (Committee on Standards), and Christopher Struck, Standards Chair.  For the Young Investigator Award, James Phillips coordinated both the Victoria and Louisville meetings. The JASA Associate Editors for Noise are Giovanni Brambilla, Sanford Fidell, Kirill Horoshenkov, Yun Jing, Alexandra Lobeau, William Murphy, and Alan Wall. The JASA Express Letters Associate Editors for Noise are Eddie Lau, Alexandra Lobeau, and Tracieanne Neilsen.  The Editor for the Proceedings of Meetings in Acoustics is Kent Gee with Alan Wall serving as associate editor.

In conclusion, I wish to thank the members of TCNS for their participation and enthusiasm this past year, making my role as Chair an enjoyable experience.  My apologies to anyone whose contribution I may have overlooked in the above report.  Please don’t hesitate to let me know if I did.  I look forward to continuing to serve as your Chair.

James E. Phillips
Chair, 2018-2021

Noise website

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Physical Acoustics

This report summarizes activities of the Physical Acoustics Technical Committee following the Minneapolis meeting (Spring 2018) and includes the Victoria meeting (Fall 2018) and the Louisville meeting (Spring 2019).

The 176th meeting in Victoria included several special sessions: Acoustic Metamaterials and Super-Resolution Imaging, Matthew Guild and Jeffrey Rogers Outdoor Sound Propagation, Vladimir Ostashev, Philippe Blanc-Benon, and D. Wilson Novel Approaches to Acoustic and Elastic Wave Experimentation: Concepts, Hardware and Novel Processing Methods, Michael Haberman, Dirk-Jan van Manen, and Theodor Becker Challenges in Computational Acoustics, D. Wilson and Matthew Blevins Interactions of Sound Beams with Objects, Likun Zhang and Grant Eastland

The 177th Meeting in Louisville had 5 special sessions: Battlefield Acoustics, W. C. Kirkpatrick Alberts and Gregory Lyons On His 100th Birthday, Isadore Rudnick Speaks for Himself, Jay Maynard Nonlinear Acoustics for Non-Specialists, Won-Suk Ohm and Kent Gee Acoustofluidics, Max Denis, Kedar Chitale, and Charles Thompson Infrasound, Roger Waxler and Philip Blom

At the Louisville meeting, a PA subcommittee was formed, to oversee the JASA reflections initiative. Committee members are Jay Maynard, Carr Everbach, Larry Crum

PASS 2018 was a success! It was held at The University of Mississippi, June 3-8, 2018. 32 students from 18 universities (from US, UK, and China) attended. Lectures were presented by Greg Swift (thermoacoustics), Preston Wilson (bubbles), Mark Hamilton (nonlinear acoustics), Tonya Khokhlova (biomedical), Roger Waxler (infrasound), Veerle Keppens (solid state), and Scott Sommerfeldt (active noise control).

Veerle M. Keppens
Chair, 2017-2020

Physical Acoustics website

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Psychological and Physiological Acoustics

This report covers the activities of the Technical Committee on Psychological and Physiological Acoustics (PPTC) from June 2018 through May 2019, which includes the Victoria meeting in November 2018 and the Louisville meeting in May 2019.

The fall meeting is generally less well attended by PPTC, due to the decision to focus on the Spring meeting, except in unusual circumstances such as international meetings. Victoria, BC was both an international meeting and a location near many members in the Pacific NW, who were eager to take advantage of the first meeting in their region since Seattle 2011. As a result, four special sessions were organized, including an outreach session that was associated with a technical initiative to bring three junior investigators who integrate behavioral and physiological and/or anatomical techniques to probe questions of how neural processes relate to auditory perception and perceptual deficits. The session was very successful and will be repeated in the future. Roughly 50 members of PPTC were present at the Victoria TC meeting.

The Spring meeting in Louisville was very well attended by PPTC, with over 100 people at the TC Meeting. Six special sessions were presented, including an outreach to students from clinical and physiological acoustics, which was associated with a technical initiative to pay some of the costs of attendance. One criticism of the meeting was that no podium sessions were organized based on submitted abstracts. Future meetings will be sure to include such sessions to ensure that new work is highlighted. There was also a criticism regarding the number of male speakers in the podium sessions. This will be included as an evaluation criterion in future special session review processes. A form explaining the review criteria and allowing proposers to address them will be used in the future. The following PPTC members were elected in May 2019: Magdalena Wojtczak, Pavel Zahorik, Yi Shen, Erol Ozmeral, Jungmee Lee, Deniz Baskent. Their terms will start after the Chicago meeting in May 2020 and will run until after the Spring meeting in 2023.

At the Louisville meeting, Glenis Long was awarded the 2019 William and Christine Hartmann Prize in Auditory Neuroscience and Barbara Shinn-Cunningham was awarded the 2019 Helmholtz-Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal. The following people associated with PPTC were elected ASA Fellows in 2018: Brian F. Katz, Catherine L. Rogers, Lori Leibold, Rajka Smiljanic, Edward J. Walsh.

ASA Leadership will include the following PPTC members in the coming year: Diane Kewley-Port (President-Elect), Peggy Nelson (Vice-President), Brian C.J. Moore (Executive Council). The following will serve as ASA Committee chairs and/or PPTC ex officio members: William Hartmann (Chair, Rules and Governance), Elizabeth Strickland (Chair, Membership), Marjorie Leek (Outgoing Chair, Membership). Ex officio: Lori Leibold (Membership), Andrew Oxenham (Awards and Medals), Daniel Guest (Student Council), Skyler Jennings (Committee on Standards). The following have served or are newly appointed in 2019 as Associate Editors of JASA, JASA Express Letters, and Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics: JASA: J.G.W. Bernstein, L.R. Bernstein, H.M. Bharadwaj, M.J. Goupell, K.S. Helfer, S. Verhulst, C.A. Shera, J. Braasch, M. Dietz, P.X. Joris, J.J. Lentz, B.L. Lonsbury-Martin, G.C. Stecker, A.K.C. Lee (Coordinating Editor); JASA EL: C. Bergevin, M. Chatterjee, B.L. Lonsbury-Martin, Q.-J. Fu; POMA: H. Patra

PPTC is grateful to these members and to all the others who serve ASA on committees and Task Forces.

Frederick M. Gallun
Chair, 2017-2020

Psychological and Physiological Acoustics website

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Signal Processing in Acoustics

The Technical Committee on Signal Processing in Acoustics (TCSP) concludes a productive year highlighted by a wide-ranging set of special sessions addressing various signal processing challenges faced in acoustics. A sincere thank you goes out to Paul Gendron of Univ. of Massachusetts Dartmouth for his excellent service as Chair of this Committee for the previous 3 years.

At the Fall 2018 Meeting in Victoria, Canada we hosted three special sessions: “Machine Learning for Acoustic Applications” was organized by Peter Gerstoft of SIO Marine Physics Lab and Weichang Li of Aramco Research Center and featured 11 invited talks and 15 contributed talks on a popular and emerging technique in acoustics research. “Detection and Tracking of Mobile Targets” was organized by Siu Kit Lau of the National Univ. of Singapore and Kainam Wong of Hong Kong Polytechnic Univ. and featured 11 invited talks and 11 contributed talks on another popular signal processing topic. “Geometric Signal Processing in Acoustics” was organized by Ananya Sen Gupta of the Univ. of Iowa and Jeffrey Rogers of Naval Research Laboratory and featured 4 invited talks and 3 contributed talks. Our Victoria Technical Program organizers were Kainam Wong, Kai Gemba of the Univ. of California San Diego, and Paul Hursky of Sonar-synesthetics.

At the Spring 2019 Meeting in Louisville we hosted two special sessions: “Bayesian Inference in Acoustical Signal Processing” was organized by Ning Xiang of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Zoi-Heleni Michalopoulou of New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Paul Gendron and featured 8 invited talks and 1 contributed talk. “Borehole Logging Acoustics” was organized by Said Assous of Weatherford and Lee Culver of Penn State and featured 5 invited talks and 2 contributed talks. Our Louisville Technical Program organizers were Lee Culver and Ryan Harne of Ohio State Univ.

Our Young Presenter Award for Victoria and Louisville were organized and lead by Jeff Rogers. The following presentations were recognized from the Victoria Meeting: Tyler Flynn of Univ. of Michigan for “Two-dimensional high-resolution acoustic localization of distributed coherent sources for structural health monitoring,” and Mylan Cook of Brigham Young Univ. for “Using coherence to improve calculation of active acoustic intensity.” The following presentations were recognized from the Louisville Meeting: Vaibhav Chavali of George Mason Univ. for “Statistical characterization of cross terms in snapshot-averaged multiplicative processors,” and Michael C. Mortenson of Brigham Young Univ. for “Extending Bandwidth for Sound Power Measurements.” Our Technical Committee voted to change our Young Presenter Award into a Best Student Paper Award for future meetings.

The TCSP is currently sponsoring an International Student Challenge Problem with solutions due 30 Sep. 2019 and the winner announced at the Fall ASA meeting in San Diego. The problem and solution requirements are described in the Spring 2019 issue of Acoustics Today (vol 15, issue 1). A copy of the article can be found at https://acousticstoday.org/international-student-challenge-problem-in-acoustic-signal-processing-2019-brian-g-ferguson/. Data files referred to the article are also available for download from https://acousticstoday.org/2019-challenge-files/. The competition is being managed by Brian Ferguson of Australia Department of Defense, Lee Culver, and Kai Gemba.

Our student representative this year has been Michael Rollins of Univ. of Cincinnati. John Buck, Univ. of Mass. Dartmouth represents TCSP before the ASA Committee on Education. James Preisig of JPAnalytics serves as the TCSP representative to the Membership Committee. Ning Xiang serves as representative to the Medals and Awards Committee. Ben Faber of Faber Acoustical serves as TCSP representative to the ASA Committee on Standards. The TCSP website is maintained by Ryan Harne and the site is located at http://tcspasa.org. The TCSP is served by a talented and conscientious group of associate editors and we are immensely grateful for their patience and care this year. We welcome Julian de Rosny of Institut Langevin and Efren Fernandez-Grande of Technical Univ. of Denmark as SP Associate Editors for the JASA, joining Jianlong Li of Zhejiang Univ., Zoi-Heleni Michalopoulou, Karim Sabra of Georgia Tech, and Kainam Wong. Peter Gerstoft serves as our coordinating editor to JASA. Our JASA-EL Associate Editors are Lisa Zurk of Univ. of Washington and Paul Gendron. Our POMA Associate Editors were Ryan Harne, Paul Hursky, and Jeff Rogers.

Several new members were added to TCSP including Ryan Harne, Kai Gemba, Trevor Jerome, Buye Xu, Karim Sabra, Jianlong Li, and Efren Fernandez-Grande. We look forward to our Fall 2019 meeting in San Diego, California. TCSP will continue to lead scientific efforts to advance the theory and methods of inference from ever increasing volumes of acoustic observations.

Brian E. Anderson
Chair, 2018–2021

Signal Processing in Acoustics website

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Speech Communication

This report summarizes activities within the Speech Communication TC between the
Victoria meeting (Fall 2019) and Louisville meeting (Spring 2019).
Leadership: Current members of the TC are:

Term to 2019	Term to 2020	Term to 2021
Tessa C. Bent	Christina C. Akbari	Melissa M. Baese-Berk
Charles B. Chang	Donald Derrick	Mary Ester Beckman
Helen M. Hanson	Terry L. Gottfried	Kelly H. Berkson
Diane Kewley-Port	Lori J. Leibold	Ann R. Bradlow
Shrikanth S. Narayanan	Lucie Menard	Francois-Xavier Brajot
Liran Oren	Emily Myers	Cynthia G. Clopper
Sona Patel	Tyler K. Perrachione	James H. Hillenbrand
Catherine L. Rogers	Megha Sundara	Laura L. Koenig
Christine H. Shadle	Lynne A. Werner	Benjamin R. Munson
Christian E. Stilp		Kanae Nishi
Maureen L. Stone		Gordon J.T. Ramsay
Mark Vandam		Melissa A. Redford
Emily Q. Wang		Ocke-Schwen Bohn
Xinhui Zhou		Keiichi Tajima
		Kristin J. Van Engen
		Kiyoko Yoneyama

Ex officio:
Benjamin R. Munson, member of Membership Committee
Anders Lofqvist, member of Medals and Awards Committee (replaced by Jody Kreiman, starting after the Louisville meeting)
Miran Oh, member of Student Council
Zhaoyan Zhang, member of ASACOS
Other SC TC members supporting the Speech Community include Eric Hunter, who maintains our web page, as well as our Facebook and Twitter accounts and Ann Bradlow who is a member of the Executive Council. Alexander Francis also represents our TC on the ASA Panel on Public Policy. We are excited to have Diane Kewley-Port step into the President elect role in the coming year.

We appreciate the time and energy contributed by our TC members. A special thanks to the TC members who will complete their term of service in June 2019.
Publications: We thanks our active associate editors. Current Associate Editors for JASA are: Speech Production – Susanne Fuchs, Ewa Jacewicz, Ohio State University, Anders Lofqvist, and Zhaoyan Zhang ; Speech Perception – Deniz Baskent, Tessa C. Bent, Megha Sundara, and Benjamin V. Tucker; Speech Processing – Paavo Alku, Carol Y. Espy-Wilson, John H. L. Hansen, and Michael I. Mandel;
Associate Editors for JASA Express Letters are: Speech Production – Marc Garellek, Anders Lofqvist, and Brad H. Story; Speech Perception – Martin Cooke and Rajka Smiljanic; Speech Processing Perception – Douglas D. O'Shaughnessy

Associate Editors for POMA: Kanae Nishi and Catherine Rogers
Technical Program: Over the last year, the Speech TC organized a number of stimulating special sessions on diverse topics (summarized below). These sessions ran very smoothly and were well received by our members. Rajka Smiljanic served as the TPO for the past 2 meetings. Our TC is grateful for the dedication and care she puts into this; it is reassuring to know that SC program planning is in good hands. Our members have also embraced the live-streaming initiative.

At the fall 2018 (Victoria) meeting we sponsored 4 special sessions:
Coupling Phonetics and Psycholinguistics
Yue Wang, Ratree Wayland, Ann Bradlow
Recent advances in experimental, computational, and clinical research in voice production and perception
Michael Doellinger & Zhaoyan Zhang
The Sounds of Emotion
Shae Morgan, Kathrin Rothermich
Phonetics of under-documented languages
Benjamin Tucker & Richard Wright
At the spring 2019 (Louisville) we sponsored 3 Special Sessions:
Acoustic properties of infant- and child directed speech
Mark Van Dam & Laura Dilley
Perception of speech directed to Infants and children
Mark Van Dam & Linda Polka
Exploring the interface between linguistic processing and talker recognition
Rachel Theodore & Tyler Perrachione

Student poster competition. Each meeting we pick 2 winners and also provide every student participating in the competition with some feedback from the judges of their poster. The energy poured into this process and the high volume of student entries and judges participating at each meeting demonstrates our strong commitment to high quality research and to student mentorship. The Fall 2018 (Victoria) competition was organized by Wendy Herd, Kelly Berkson, and Marcin Wroblewski; the Spring 2019 (Louisville) competition was organized by Marcin Wroblewski and Laura Dilley. We thank the organizers and many judges who make this work so well.

Awards: No awards were given in Speech Communication this year. Given the workload involved in developing nomination dossiers, the SC TC has formed a sub-committee to work with our representative to the Awards and Medals committee. The committee includes Jody Kreiman (our TC rep), Rajka Smiljanic, Linda Polka and Allard Jongman.
Membership: Two new fellows in Speech Communication was selected this year: Rajka Smiljanic and Cathi Rogers. The SC TC also needs to put more energy into nominating fellows. There is no shortage of deserving candidates in our TC.
Stetson Scholarship: The Review Committee for 2019 included Chair: Rachel Theodore (chair), Tyler Perrachione, Megha Sundara, and Mark Vandam. We thank them for their time and effort in reviewing the applications.

Linda Polka
Chair, 2017-2019

Speech Communication website

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Structural Acoustics and Vibration

The Structural Acoustics and Vibration Technical Committee (SAVTC) had a successful and productive year of special sessions sponsored by the committee and hosted Student and Young Presenter competitions at both of the meetings. This annual report covers SAVTC activities and meetings occurring during the one-year 2018-19 period beginning after the Spring 2018 ASA Minneapolis meeting and through the Spring 2019 Louisville meeting. During this period, Robert Koch completed the first year of his 2018-2021 second term as chair of the SAVTC.
The SAVTC extends its gratitude to the many SAVTC members and friends of SAV who actively participate as volunteer lead representatives for numerous ASA committee and editorial activities including, but certainly not limited to:
o Robert Koch (ASACOS);
o James Phillips (Medals and Awards);
o Robert Koch (Membership Committee);
o Ryan Harne (SAVTC Web page);
o Tyler “TJ” Flynn (Student Council, completed term mid-year)
o Colby Cushing (Student Council, started term mid-year)
o Matthew Kamrath (Education in Acoustics Committee);
o Ben Shafer (Student Paper Competition);
o Ben Shafer and Robert Koch (Technical Program Organizers);
o Nicole Kessissoglou (new Coordinating Editor), Li Cheng, Nail Gumerov, Kai Ming Li, Steffen Marburg, Marcel C. Remillieux, Franck Sgard, Nickolas Vlahopoulos, Kuangcheng Wu (JASA Associate Editors for SAV);
o Greg McDaniel, Nickolas Vlahopoulos (JASA Express Letters Associate Editor for SAV);
o Steve Shepard (POMA Editor).

Update: Just following the Spring 2018 ASA Minneapolis meeting, the current term for Brian Anderson ended as an JASA Associate Editor for SAV. As he was also SAVTC’s Coordinating Editor, a lengthy search for a new SAVTC Coordinating Editor to succeed Brain commenced. Recently, with the JASA Editor-in-Chief’s invaluable help, Nicole Kessissoglou was identified and agreed to serve as the new Coordinating Editor for the SAVTC. Thanks very much to both Brian and Nicole for your service!
176th ASA Meeting Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, 5-9 November 2018
At the 176th ASA meeting in Victoria, Canada, SAVTC sponsored the following five special sessions and one General session of contributed papers with a total of 45 papers presented (19 invited, 26 contributed):
• Metamaterials: Chairs, Christina Naify and Alexey Titovich
• Advances in thermoacoustics: Chairs, Matthew Kamrath and Robert Koch
• History of computational methods in structural acoustics and vibration: Chairs, James Phillips, Benjamin Shafer, and John Fahnline
• Utilization of high-speed cameras to measure vibration: Chairs, Micah Shepherd and Trevor Jerome
• Advanced modeling techniques for computational acoustics: Chairs, Kuangcheng Wu, Elizabeth Magliula, and James Phillips
• General Topics in Structural Acoustics and Vibration: Chair, Benjamin Shafer
The TPOM representatives were Benjamin Shafer and Robert Koch.
SAVTC had 6 papers entered in the Best Student and Young Presenter competition at the 176th ASA Meeting. Ben Shafer coordinated the competition and the winners were:
1st Place
Caleb B. Goates, Brigham Young University
A quasi-analytical formulation for acoustic radiation modes of simple curved structures
2nd Place
Mark J. Cops, Boston University
Finite element modeling of fluid-saturated metallic foams from micro-computed tomography
177th ASA Meeting, Louisville, Kentucky, 13-17 May 2019
At the ASA Louisville meeting, SAVTC sponsored the following five special sessions and two General sessions of contributed papers with a total of 70 papers presented (15 invited, 55 contributed):
• Acoustic metamaterials: Chairs, Christina Naify and Alexey Titovich
• Noise and vibration in rotating machinery: Chairs, Robert Koch and Elizabeth Magliula
• Novel damping treatments: Chairs, Ben Shafer, Ben Beck, and Hubert Hall
• Smart materials for acoustics and vibration: Chairs, Katie Matlack and Bogdan Popa
• Vibration reduction for extraordinarily sensitive applications: Chairs, James Phillips and Mohammed Afrough
• General Topics in Structural Acoustics and Vibration I and II: Chairs, Benjamin Shafer and Robert Koch
The TPOM representatives were Benjamin Shafer and Robert Koch.
The winners of the Best Student and Young Presenter competition (29 entrees), well-coordinated again by Ben Shafer, were:
1st Place
Colby W. Cushing, University of Texas at Austin
Measuring anisotropy in underwater inertial metamaterials
2nd Place
Tyler Jake Flynn, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
Data-driven approaches for damage-type classification in vibrating square plates
Two ASA society-level awards given to long-time distinguished members of the SAV Technical Committee at the ASA Louisville meeting should be specifically noted here. First of all, ASA Treasurer and past SAVTC Chair David Feit received the 2019 Distinguished Service Citation Award in recognition of outstanding service to the ASA Society. Secondly, Scott Sommerfeldt, also a past SAVTC Chair, received the 2019 Vice President’s Gavel Award as he just finished up his excellent year of service to ASA serving as its Vice President.
In closing, it must be mentioned that, among other goals, a recent set of priorities of the SAVTC Chair has been to increase the number of new members in the committee and to also try and get younger as a committee as well. This was primarily in response to the declining volunteering and meeting attendance of a number of the more senior members of the committee who are now quite understandably drawing down their society activities after decades of contribution at the highest possible levels in the TC and the Society at large. As a result of this thrust, four new SAVTC members were officially added in 2018 and another five were added to the SAV technical committee membership role in the January 2019 new member request cycle – congratulations and welcome aboard to new 2019 SAVTC members Ryan Harne, Stephanie Konarski, Bogdan Popa, Michael Rose, and Jason Smoker. In addition, all of the recent nine new members have already been actively participating and volunteering for TC tasking, session organizing, etc. Thanks very much to them all for their helpful energy, ideas, and volunteering time!!

Robert M. Koch
Chair, 2015 – 2018, 2018 – 2021

Structural Acoustics and Vibration website

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Underwater Acoustics

This report covers the activities of the Technical Committee on Underwater Acoustics (TCUW) and its members during the period from July 2018 through June 2019.

The 176th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America/2018 Acoustics Week in Canada was held Monday through Friday, 5-9 November 2018 at the Victoria Conference Centre and the Fairmont Empress Hotel, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.  Stan Dosso served as ASA Meeting Chair and Jon Collis served as TPOM Rep. for the Victoria meeting.  TCUW sponsored or co-sponsored the following special sessions: (1) Unmanned Vehicles and Acoustics (chaired by Erin Fischell), (2) Acoustic Vector Field Studies (chaired by Bob Barton & Kevin Smith), (3) Sediment Acoustics – Inferences from forward modeling, direct, and statistical inversion methods (chaired by Charles Holland & Stan Dosso), (4) Biological Effects on Seabed Geoacoustic Properties (chaired by Kevin M. Lee, Megan S. Ballard & Kelly M. Dorgan), and (5) Variability in Shallow Water Propagation and Reverberation (chaired by Todd Hefner & David Dall’Osto).  The student paper award winners were Gabriel R. Venagas (First place for “Geoacoustic properties of seagrass-bearing sediments”) and Alexander Scott Douglass (Second place for “Out-of-band beamforming in shallow water with horizontal arrays”).

The 177th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America was held Monday through Friday, 13–17 May 2019 at The Galt House, Louisville, Kentucky, USA.  DJ Tang served as TPOM Rep.  New fellows were recognized and congratulated:  Megan Ballard (For contributions to shallow water propagation and geoacoustic inversion) and Woojae Seong (For contribution to geoacoustic inversion and ocean signal processing).  The student paper award winners were Brandon M Lee (First place for “Machine learning methods for estimating probability density functions of transmission loss: robustness to source frequency and depth”) and Matthew Charles Zeh (Second place for “Model-data comparison of sound propagation in a glacierized fjord with a variable ice top-boundary layer”).  TCUW sponsored and co-sponsored the following special sessions (lead TC):  (1) Understanding animal song (AB, AO, SP, SC); (2) Finite Difference Time Domain method across acoustics (PA, BA, SA, SP, UW); (3) Acoustofluidics (PA, BA, SA, SP, UW); (4) Reconfigurable arrays for adaptive wave guiding (SP, EA, PA, SA, UW); (5) Bayesian inference in acoustic signal processing (SP, AO, NS, UW); (6) Borehole Logging Acoustics (SP, AO, PA, AS, UW); and (7) Random Matrix Theory in Acoustic Signal Processing (SP, NS, UW).

The chair sincerely thanks the many volunteers who make the activities of TCUW possible.

D. Benjamin Reeder
Chair, 2018-2021

Underwater Acoustics website

2018 – 19 Annual Reports

Technical Committees represent thirteen different areas of acoustics in the Society. Appointments to the Technical Committees take place in January. Members who are interested in being appointed to a technical committee should send a message to  asa@acousticalsociety.org.

Acoustical Oceanography (AO)
Animal Bioacoustics (AB)
Architectural Acoustics (AA)
Biomedical Acoustics (BA)
Computational Acoustics (CA)
Engineering Acoustics (EA)
Musical Acoustics (MU)
Noise (NS)
Physical Acoustics (PA)
Psychological and Physiological Acoustics (PP)
Signal Processing in Acoustics (SP)
Speech Communication (SC)
Structural Acoustics and Vibration (SA)
Underwater Acoustics (UW)

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Acoustical Oceanography

This annual report reviews activities of the Technical Committee on Acoustical Oceanography (TCAO) for the 176th and 177th meetings of Acoustical Society of America (ASA) in Victoria, British Colombia and in Louisville, Kentucky. The AOTC enjoyed a wonderfully productive and eventful year where most of our activities centered around the Fall Victoria meeting, and laying the ground work for an extensive program at the 178th meeting in San Diego.
In Victoria there were four extremely productive special sessions on the topics of 1) Ocean observatories, 2) Arctic acoustics, 3) Sound propagation in sediments, and 4) Machine learning and data science. While more modest in scope the Louisville meeting hosted one important and pithy special session addressing future and emerging areas in acoustical oceanography. These special sessions included over 20 student papers and over a dozen invited speakers. Four prize winning student papers were Elizabeth Frances Weidner, with her paper entitled “Broadband acoustic observations of individual naturally occurring hydrate-coated bubbles in the Gulf of Mexico’’; Emma Reeves Ozanich, with “Ocean acoustic range estimation in noisy environments using convolutional networks’’; Luis Donoso, with “Low frequency acoustical scattering from dynamic schools of swim bladder fish’’; and Athanasios G Athanassiadis, with “The sound of light: towards ocean acoustic sensing with an optical breakdown transducer’’. I thank all my skilled session organizers for their successful planning and execution of their sessions.
Over the year there were also several noteworthy achievements of AO members that warrant mention. First, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Senior Scientist and 2017 recipient of the Walter Munk Award, Dr. Andone Lavery was elected President of the Oceanography Society. This academic society was founded in 1988 with the goals to advance oceanographic research, technology, and education, and to disseminate knowledge of oceanography and its application through research and education and it is one of the premier ocean science societies in the world. Next AO scientist Stan Dosso of the University of Victoria was elected vice president of the Acoustical society, and lastly Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s researcher Peter Gerstoft had his work featured in an amusing Steven Colbert monologue entitled “There's A Weird Noise Coming from An Antarctic Ice Shelf’’.
Lastly, I mention some changing of the guard within AO. Our student representative Matthew Zeh will hand the baton to Elizabeth Weidner and the new AO medals and awards representative will be Martin Siderius of Portland State University who takes over for Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher Grant Deane. Martin’s leadership will be critical in the coming three years as the TC will be able to offer the AO silver medal starting in 2020. Finally of upmost importance, Grant Deane will be stepping into the AO chairpersonship starting at the San Diego meeting. I am confident that the TC will continue to flourish under this new leadership. I want to thank everyone in the TC for all the great efforts they have put forth over my tenure at AO chair in creating an energetic and dynamic atmosphere in AO and the greater society as a whole. We look forward to productive and exciting years ahead.

John A. Colosi
Chair, 2016–2019
Acoustical Oceanography website

Acoustical Oceanography website

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Animal Bioacoustics

This report covers activities of the Technical Committee on Animal Bioacoustics (TCAB) from May 2018 to May 2019, including the two ASA meetings in Victoria (joint meeting with the Canadian Acoustical Association, November 2018) and Louisville (May 2019). Victoria was my first meeting as Chair of TCAB. We currently have an active group of 59 members and several of those individuals generously volunteer their time to represent TCAB.
In Victoria, TCAB sponsored four special sessions: “Passive acoustic density estimation: Recent advances and outcomes for terrestrial and marine species,” “Combining passive and active acoustics for ecological investigations,” “Anything you can do I can do better: Bat versus dolphin biosonar,” and “Fish and marine invertebrate bioacoustics,” in addition to four other general topic sessions. The first TCAB short course on “Bioacoustics and Ecoacoustics” was also a success at the Victoria meeting. TCAB offers awards for Best Paper in Animal Bioacoustics at each meeting. Twenty-seven entries resulted in some stiff competition for this award at the Victoria meeting. Mikala Epp won first prize for “Investigation of the context of humpback whale non-song calls in the North Atlantic,” and Youenn Jezequel won second prize for “Buzzing sounds used as a mean of intra-specific interaction during agonistic encounters in male European lobsters (Homarus gammarus).”
In Louisville, two special sessions in AB were: “Bioinspiration and biomimetics in acoustics,” and “Understanding animal song,” along with general topic sessions and a poster session. TCAB received twenty-five entries for Best Paper in AB at the Louisville meeting and awarded best oral presentation to Anastasiya Kobrina for, “The effects of age and sex on rates of hearing loss for pure tones varying in duration,” and best poster presentation to Jay Schwartz for, “What is a scream? Acoustic characteristics of a human call type.” Congratulations to the winners and a big thanks to those who evaluated presentations for Best Paper in Victoria and Louisville.
In terms of Animal Bioacoustics Technical initiatives for 2018-2019, the ASA generously supported the 2nd Oceanoise Asia Symposium, Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life Conference, DCLDE Workshop, the 1st African Bioacoustics Conference, NE Regional Environmental Acoustics Symposium, the SUNY Summer Short Course, and the IQOE Workshop on Ocean Sound Monitoring Standards.
Animal Bioacoustics TC is actively involved in the development of acoustic standards. Currently, there are working groups on the Effects of Sound on Fish and Turtles; Towed Array Passive Acoustic Operations for Bioacoustic Applications; Description and Measurement of the Ambient Sound in Parks, Wilderness Areas, and Other Quiet and/or Pristine Areas; Noise and Vibration in Animal Laboratory Facilities; Auditory Evoked Potential Testing of Toothed Whale Hearing; and Acoustic Metadata for Passive Acoustic Monitoring. Everybody is welcome to join working groups and actively participate.
A huge thank you to all the members of TCAB for their support and involvement in the various activities of the ASA.

Marla Holt
Chair, 2018-2021

Animal Bioacoustics website

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Architectural Acoustics

The Technical Committee on Architectural Acoustics is active and healthy, with more than 250 members and strong engagement at ASA national and regional meetings throughout the year.
Leadership
Eric Reuter finished his term as Chair after the Louisville meeting.
A significant initiative was undertaken after the Victoria meeting to change the way TCAA elects its leadership. Traditionally, only one candidate was selected by the nominating committee, and run against the current Secretary, with voting done at the corresponding spring meeting by those present. This was out of sync with the procedures of the other Technical Committees.
Under our new procedures, the Nominating Committee will select two candidates for the position of Chair-Elect. The Chair-Elect will serve the duties of Secretary for three years, and subsequently serve as Chair for three years. Balloting is now electronic, engaging all eligible members of the Committee.
To facilitate the transition, we held one-time simultaneous elections for Chair and Chair-Elect.
The Chair for the 2019-2022 term is Ana Jaramillo. The Chair-Elect is David Woolworth.
Meetings
Victoria – TCAA sponsored 9 special sessions with 96 papers presented. Our open committee meeting was held on Tuesday, November 6, 2018 with approximately 66 in attendance.
Louisville – TCAA sponsored 7 special sessions with 64 papers presented. Our open committee meeting was held on Tuesday, May 14, 2019 with 94 in attendance.
Medals and Awards
The Gold Medal was awarded to Bill Cavanaugh at the Louisville meeting.
The Wallace Clement Sabine Medal was awarded to Michael Vorländer at the Victoria meeting.
David Woolworth because an ASA Fellow at the Victoria meeting.
Student Paper Awards
At each meeting, TCAA awards prizes for the best student papers. We congratulate the following winners from the past year:
Victoria Meeting
1st Place: Daniel Tay, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
“High spatial resolution scanning for experimental room-acoustic measurements in scale models”
2nd Place: Anna Catton, University of Nebraska Lincoln
“How physical versus panned sources in dry or reverberant conditions affect accuracy of localization in sound field synthesis systems”
Louisville Meeting
1st Place: Matthew Neal, Penn State
“The room impulse response in time, frequency, and space: mapping spatial energy using spherical array beamforming techniques”
2nd Place: Byeongho Jo, KAIST
” Nonsingular EB-ESPRIT for the localization of early reflections in a room”

Eric Reuter
Chair, 2016-2019

Architectural Acoustics website

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Biomedical Acoustics

This annual report summarizes the activities within the Biomedical Acoustics TC during the Minnesota meeting (Spring 2018) and through the Louisville meeting (Spring 2018) and including the Victoria meeting (Fall 2018).

The 175th ASA meeting was held in Minnesota, MN. The four special sessions were “Using acoustic wave propagation to estimate quantitative material properties of tissue” by Matthew Urban, “Induction Mechanisms for Bubble Nucleation” by Brian Fowlkes and Ron Roy, “Transcranial Focused Ultrasound for Targeted Brain Therapies” by Emad Ebbini, and “Acoustic imaging of small vessels and low speed flow” by Mahdi Bayat. We had an eventful BATC meeting where we discussed several ASA initiatives including an upcoming Strategic Plan meeting, ASA-Government Relations Improvement, a new cross-discipline Computational Acoustics Technical Specialty Group, and better acoustics outreach. Our BA technical initiative to conduct a FOCUS workshop by Robert McGough was approved by TC for the Louisville meeting. We had an outstanding student poster competition in Minnesota. This poster competition was organized and coordinated by Kevin Haworth. Congratulations to the Winners:  Tho N.H.T. Tran (3rd Place), Parker O’Brien (2nd Place), Dezhuang Ye (1st Place)! Many thanks to the poster judges in Minnesota: Hong Chen, Max Denis, Tim Doyle, Jim Lacefield, Brian Tracey and Matt Urban. We also had the privilege of congratulating Kenneth Suslick for receiving the Helmholtz-Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal in Physical and Biomedical Acoustics, Vic Sparrow who was elected President-Elect and Tyrone Porter who was elected to Executive Council.

The 176th ASA meeting was held in beautiful Victoria, BC. The six special sessions were “The state of the art in lung ultrasound, past, present and future” organized by Libertario Demi and Martin Verweij, “Bubble Trouble in Therapeutic Ultrasound”  organized by Christy Holland and Klazina Kooiman, “Targeted Drug Delivery – Acoustic Radiation Force” organized John Allen and Alfred Yu, “Shock waves and ultrasound for calculus fragmentation” organized by Juliana Simon and Michael Bailey, “Therapeutic ultrasound transducers” organized by Adam Maxwell and Tatiana Khokhlova, and “Wave propagation in complex media: from theory to applications” organized by Guillaume Haiat and Pierre Belanger. The BATC meeting on Wednesday evening was also eventful where we discussed a future change to the remote presentation policy, upcoming surveys, and outreach to industry. Congratulations to two new BA Fellows: Eleanor P. Stride for contributions to the modelling, development, and manufacturing of acoustically responsive biomaterials and Ahmed A. Al-Jumaily for contributions to biomedical applications of acoustics and vibrations.

The 177th ASA meeting was held in Louisville, KY. The four special sessions were “Cardiovascular Ultrasound: Imaging and Therapy” organized by Kevin Haworth and Jonathan Kopacheck, “Lung ultrasound and tissue stiffness method” organized by Xiaoming Zhang and Libertario Demi, “Interaction of light and ultrasound” organized Carr Everbach and Ron Roy, and “Inverse Problems in Biomedical Ultrasound” organized by Doug Mast. Robert McGough conducted the first BA modeling workshop and it was a huge success with nearly 50 attendees and great feedback! The BATC meeting on Wednesday evening was very well-attended (over 50 new and continuing members) where we discussed a JASA Special Issue initiative (Reflections) and the Strategic Summit Results and related Champions meeting where the four task groups would be formed. We had another outstanding student poster competition in Louisville. This poster competition was organized and coordinated by Kevin Haworth. Congratulations to the Winners: (1st) Billy Y.S. Yiu (2aBA2): Live color encoded speckle imaging platform for real time complex flow visualization in vivo, (2nd) Frederick William Damen, 2aBA5: Spatial analysis of cardiac strain using high frequency four dimensional ultrasound in mice, (3rd) Joseph Majdi, 5aBA3: Tissue Doppler Imaging To Detect Muscle Fatigue! Many thanks to the poster judges: Bob McGough, Julianna Simon, Mike Bailey, Jim McAteer, Kang Kim, Marie Muller, Christy Holland, Jonathan Kopechek, Alfred Yu, Costas Arvanitis, Paul Barbone, Larry Crum, Libertario Demi, and Viktor Bollen. Congratulations to Adam Maxwell for receiving the R. Bruce Lindsay Award!

The efforts of everyone who contributed to the Biomedical Acoustics Technical Committee this past year are gratefully acknowledged. This includes, but is not limited to, incoming and outgoing BATC representatives on committees (Medals and Awards, Membership, and ASACOS – Jeff Ketterling, Tom Matula Wayne Kreider, respectively) for the Acoustical Society, Associate Editors, special session organizers, session chairs, the student council representative, poster session judges, and the poster session organizer. The Associate Editors of JASA and JASA-EL for BA related areas are W. W. L. Au, C. C. Church, R. R. Fay, J. J. Finneran, M. C. Hastings, G. Hatıat, D. K. Mellinger, D. L. Miller, A. N. Popper, T. J. Royston, A. M. Simmons, C. E. Taylor, K. A. Wear, and Suk Wang Yoon. Timothy G. Leighton is the BA editor for POMA. Many thanks to Kang Kim, Siddhartha Sikar for representing BA on the TPOM sessions for these meetings and to our new student council representative, Asis Lopez. I would also like to thank everyone else who contributed to or participated in Biomedical Acoustics activities during the past year.

Hope to see you in San Diego.

Subha Maruvada
Chair, 2017–2020

Biomedical Acoustics website

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Computational Acoustics (Technical Specialty Group)

This report summarizes activities of the Computational Acoustics Technical Specialty Group following the Minneapolis meeting (Spring 2018), to include the Victoria (Fall 2018) and Louisville (Spring 2019) meetings. The formation of the CA TSG was approved at the Minneapolis meeting. It provides a forum for researchers interested in numerical methods, optimization of calculations, benchmarking, and practical application of models. Additional information on the formation and purpose of the TSG can be found in the Acoustics Today “Sound Perspectives” article (https://acousticstoday.org/technical-specialty-group-report-computational-acoustics-d-keith-wilson/).

The CA TSG kicked off with its first official meeting in Victoria. There were 31 participants. Although the CA TSG had been formed too recently to plan its own special sessions for Victoria, there were many computationally related sessions at this meeting, including “Challenges in Computational Acoustics”, which was sponsored by PA and joint with AA, Noise, SP, and UA. It was organized by Matthew Blevins and myself.

At the 177th Meeting in Louisville, the CA TSG held its first special session, “Finite Difference Time Domain Method Across Acoustics”, which was jointly sponsored by BA, PA, UA, SP, and SAV, and organized by Michelle Swearingen, Jennifer Cooper, and Subha Maruvada. The TSG also jointly sponsored the UA session on “Uncertainty in Propagation Prediction.” I made a presentation in the Interdisciplinary Hot Topics session, on “Hot Topics in Computational Acoustics.” The second official TSG meeting was held in Louisville, with 30 participants.

With the formation of the CA TSG, JASA now also has a Computational Acoustics section, for which Nail A. Gumerov, Ying-Tsong Lin, and Nickolas Vlahopoulos serve as the Associate Editors. Vlahopoulos and myself are the AEs for JASA Express Letters.

Jennifer Cooper volunteered to serve as the CA TPOM representative starting with the San Diego (Fall 2019) meeting. The TSG plans to initiate a Young Presenter award starting with the Chicago (Spring 2020) meeting.

D. Keith Wilson
Chair, 2018–2021

Computational Acoustics website

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Engineering Acoustics

This annual report reviews the efforts in Engineering Acoustics (EA) from between May 2018 and May 2019. The information in this report is inclusive of the 176th meeting in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada on 5-9 November 2018, to the 177th meeting in Louisville, Kentucky held 13-17 May 2019.  In that time span, the members and contributors to the Technical Committee on Engineering Acoustics (TCEA) published 41 full-length articles in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America under the category of Engineering Acoustics.

TCEA sponsored sessions in the 176th Meeting included one special session and two ad hoc sessions. The special session (3pEA) was entitled “Acoustic particle velocity sensors, algorithms, and applications in air,” which was chaired by M. Scanlon and co-sponsored by the Technical Committee on Noise (TCNS). The two ad hoc sessions were “Transducer Characterization” (1pEAa) and “General Topics in Engineering Acoustics,” (1pEAb), both chaired by C. Sieck. The best student paper award was given to In-Jee Jung from the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Korean Advanced Institute of Technology (KAIST) for the presentation “Estimation of the source distance using the multiple three-dimensional acoustic intensimetry,” (3pEA4). The TCEA meeting took place at 16:30 on 6 November 2018. The primary topics of discussion included a renewed push to organize special sessions sponsored or co-sponsored by TCEA, a solicitation by the Publication Policy Committee to have TCEA members participate as media contacts for inquiries germane to EA, and increasing industry participation at ASA meetings. Details of that meeting were provided in the meeting minutes prepared by the TCEA chair.

TCEA sponsored sessions in the 177th Meeting included two ad hoc sessions: “General Topics in Engineering Acoustics: Sensors and Sources,” (4aEA) and “General Topics in Engineering Acoustics: Characterization and Measurement,” (4pEA), both chaired by M. Guild and M. Haberman. The TC also co-sponsored five additional sessions: i) “Reconfigurable Arrays for Adaptive Wave Guiding” (1aSP, co-sponsors: EA, PA, UW, SA) chaired by R. Harne and J. Rogers, ii) “Acoustofluidics I” (3aPA, co-sponsors: EA, BA), chaired by M. Denis, K. Chitale, and C. Thompson, iii) “Acoustofluidics II” (3pPA, co-sponsors: EA, BA), chaired by M. Denis, K. Chital, and C. Thompson, iv) “Noise and Vibration in Rotating Machinery” (3aSAb, co-sponsored by EA, NS), chaired by B. Koch, E. Magliula, and v) “Novel Damping Treatments” (3pSA, co-sponsored by EA, NS, AA), chaired by B. Shafer, B. Beck, H. Hall. Unfortunately, no best student paper award was given as no entries were received. The TCEA meeting took place at 16:30 on 14 May 2019. The primary topics of discussion included the organization of special sessions for upcoming ASA meetings, potential site visits to microphone companies in the Chicago area during the upcoming 179th meeting (of which there are many), a request by JASA EIC to provide a list of seminal JASA papers in the area of EA for an upcoming monthly feature called “Reflections” that will be published in anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the ASA, and the existence of new headings in JASA: “Computational Acoustics,” and “Acoustical Standards and Practice.” Details of that meeting were provided in the meeting minutes prepared by the TCEA chair. Results of the ASA Strategic Summit held in Tucson, AZ in January 2019 and the attendant Strategic Initiatives were conveyed to the meeting attendees. Finally, attendees were encouraged to become a member of the ASA and to recruit others to become members.

Michael Haberman
Chair, 2018 – 2021

Engineering Acoustics website

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Musical Acoustics

During 2018-2019 the Technical Committee on Musical Acoustics (TCMU) was chaired by Andrew Morrison. The representatives to the Society committees were: James P. Cottingham, Medals and Awards; Andrew Morrison, Committee on Standards; James Beauchamp and Thomas Moore, Membership; and Eric Rockni, Student Council. Associate editors of the society publications for the area of musical acoustics were Thomas Moore, Andrew Morrison, Tamara Smyth, and Joe Wolf (JASA); D. Murray Campbell, and Thomas Moore (JASA Express Letters); and Randy Worland (POMA). The Technical Program Organizing Committee (TPOM) representatives for the two meetings of the ASA were Whitney Coyle and Péter Rucz. Robert W. Pyle, Jr. was recognized as an ASA Fellow for contributions to the understanding of the acoustics of brass musical instruments. Those appointed or reappointed as TCMU members during the year were: Edgar J. Berdahl, Judith C. Brown, Vasileios Chatziioannou, Thomas M. Huber, Christopher M. Jasinski, Wilfried Kausel, Bozena Kostek, Timothy W. Leishman, Daniel O. Ludwigsen, Andrew N. Miller, Robert Mores, Thomas D. Rossing, Daniel A. Russell, David B. Sharp, Julius O. Smith, William J. Strong, and Joe Wolfe.

At the 176th meeting of the ASA in Victoria, B.C., November 5-9, 2018, the TCMU sponsored three special sessions and one general session. The three special sessions were: Modeling Musical Instruments and Effects (Scott Hawley and Vasileios Chatziioannou, co-chairs), Computational and experimental investigations of flow in musical instruments (Whitney Coyle, chair), Percussion Instruments (Andrew Morrison and Uwe Hansen, co-chairs).

Winners of the award for best student papers were Iran Sanadzadeh, Timothy Greer, and Jack D. Gabriel.

At the 177th ASA meeting in Louisville, KY, May 13-17, 2019, the TCMU sponsored one general and three special sessions. The special sessions were: Bluegrass music and related instruments (Whitney Coyle, chair), Transient Effects of Wind Instruments (Vasileios Chatziioannou, chair), Polyphonic Pitch Perception and Analysis (Jonas Braasch and Torben Pastore, co-chairs)

TCMU proposed a technical initiative for a concert at Louisville in order to host a concert performed by a local bluegrass band in coordination with the Bluegrass music and related instruments session. This concert was well attended by a wide cross-section of the ASA membership.  Additionally, Thom Moore taught a Short Course at the Louisville meeting on Electronic Speckle Pattern Interferometry.

Montserrat Pàmies-Vilà and Jade Case won the awards for Best Student Papers.

James Cottingham continues to maintain an excellent website for TCMU, which can be accessed at http://tcmuasa.org/. It includes links to future meetings, minutes of previous TCMU meetings, annual reports, student paper award winners, and useful links to teaching websites and musical acousticians.

Andrew J. Morrison
Chair, 2014-2019

Musical Acoustics website

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Noise

As of the May 2018 meeting in Minneapolis I began my term as Chair for the Technical Committee for Noise.  Many thanks to the past Chair, William J. Murphy, for his excellent leadership and enthusiasm the previous three years, as well as his continued assistance as I take over as Chair. Shortly after starting my term, Kieren Smith, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in Architectural Engineering Acoustics at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was selected among several candidates to act as the Student Council representative for TCNS.  Her time as our representative was short as she was soon elected to Student Council Chair.  However, her efficient and excellent support through the meetings in Victoria (November 2018) and Louisville (May 2019) was greatly appreciated.  Her replacement is Aaron Vaughn, a physics graduate student at Brigham Young University.  I welcome Aaron to the position and look forward to working with him in the future.

It has been a difficult year as we have seen the passing of several outstanding, long-time members of our committee.  In no particular order: Angelo Campanella, Jiri Tichy, Richard Lyon, William Thornton, Larry Royster, and very recently William Cavanaugh; the latter of whom had just been honored as the 2019 recipient of the Gold Medal of the Acoustical Society of America at the Louisville meeting.  The contributions to the Society, the field of acoustics, and the world in general that these people have made are too vast for words.  They will be greatly missed by our members.

During 2018-19, the membership of the Technical Committee on Noise continues to be active in the Society and been honored to serve. David Woolworth was honored as Fellow in May 2018.  Bennett Brooks was elected to the Executive Council.  Scott Sommerfeldt was succeeded by Peggy Nelson as Vice President while Victor Sparrow succeeded Lily Wang as President of the Society.  All have been active within TCNS through chairing sessions and helping to organize recent meetings.

TCNS has promoted the development of upcoming talent.  This year marks the fourth year of the Leo and Gabriela Beranek Scholarship in Architectural Acoustics and Noise Control.  This year’s recipient is Kevin Leete who is pursuing his Ph.D. in Physics and Astronomy/Physics at Brigham Young University. TCNS member Kent Gee is Kevin’s advisor.  Kevin received his undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University in the same field.  In addition, this year is the third year for the Virginia and Frank Winker Memorial Scholarship for Graduate Study in Acoustics.  This year’s recipient is Colby Cushing who is pursuing a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at University of Texas at Austin.  Colby is a graduate of the Pennsylvania State University, having earned his Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering.  I encourage faculty at all universities to encourage students to apply for these two scholarships.  I, along with the other members of the Beranek scholarship committee (Eric Reuter (TCAA Chair), Tony Hoover, Alex Case, Carl Rosenberg) and the Winker scholarship committee (Christopher Struck (ASA Standards Director), Eric Reuter (TCAA Chair), Gary Elko (alternate for Michael Haberman, Chair TCEA, who recused himself as an advisor for one of the applicants), and Daniel Russell have been privileged to review the applications of the students.

TCNS has honored several Young Investigators for the excellent papers that they have presented at the Victoria and Louisville meetings.  In Victoria, three papers were honored for the Young Investigator Awards: Kristi M. Ward for “Investigating individual susceptibility to the detrimental effects of background noise and reverberation in simulated complex acoustic environments,” Sarah E. Yoho for “Relationship between perception of speech in noise and disordered speech: Influence of sensorineural hearing loss,” and Seonghun Im for “Characterization of laptop computer noise and vibration using nearfield acoustic holography.”  In Louisville, the following three papers were honored for the Young Investigator Awards:   Mylan R. Cook for “Improved automated classification of basketball crowd noise,” Jonathan R Weber for “Quiet time impacts on the neonatal intensive care unit soundscape and patient outcomes,” and Gregory Scott Farber for “Soundprint and the ASA's International Noise Awareness Day campaign – results, what worked, and going forward.”  Congratulations to each of these young investigators.

The 176th meeting of the ASA was held in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada (joint with 2018 Acoustics Week in Canada) with 7 TCNS-led sessions (two of them with two parts) and 86 papers presented.  William Murphy, Hales Swift, and Kerrie Standlee served as the TPOM representatives.  The 177th meeting of the ASA was held in Louisville, KY.  At this meeting, 57 papers were presented in seven noise-led sessions.  William Murphy, Hales Swift, and Kerrie Standlee also served as the TPOM representatives for the Louisville meeting.  At both meetings, numerous other sessions were co-sponsored by TCNS.

Thanks to following people who have represented TCNS within the ASA during this time:  Brigitte Schulte-Fortkamp on the Medals and Awards Committee, Alex Case on the Membership Committee, Kieren Smith on Student Council, Rich Peppin on ASACOS (Committee on Standards), and Christopher Struck, Standards Chair.  For the Young Investigator Award, James Phillips coordinated both the Victoria and Louisville meetings. The JASA Associate Editors for Noise are Giovanni Brambilla, Sanford Fidell, Kirill Horoshenkov, Yun Jing, Alexandra Lobeau, William Murphy, and Alan Wall. The JASA Express Letters Associate Editors for Noise are Eddie Lau, Alexandra Lobeau, and Tracieanne Neilsen.  The Editor for the Proceedings of Meetings in Acoustics is Kent Gee with Alan Wall serving as associate editor.

In conclusion, I wish to thank the members of TCNS for their participation and enthusiasm this past year, making my role as Chair an enjoyable experience.  My apologies to anyone whose contribution I may have overlooked in the above report.  Please don’t hesitate to let me know if I did.  I look forward to continuing to serve as your Chair.

James E. Phillips
Chair, 2018-2021

Noise website

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Physical Acoustics

This report summarizes activities of the Physical Acoustics Technical Committee following the Minneapolis meeting (Spring 2018) and includes the Victoria meeting (Fall 2018) and the Louisville meeting (Spring 2019).

The 176th meeting in Victoria included several special sessions: Acoustic Metamaterials and Super-Resolution Imaging, Matthew Guild and Jeffrey Rogers Outdoor Sound Propagation, Vladimir Ostashev, Philippe Blanc-Benon, and D. Wilson Novel Approaches to Acoustic and Elastic Wave Experimentation: Concepts, Hardware and Novel Processing Methods, Michael Haberman, Dirk-Jan van Manen, and Theodor Becker Challenges in Computational Acoustics, D. Wilson and Matthew Blevins Interactions of Sound Beams with Objects, Likun Zhang and Grant Eastland.

The 177th Meeting in Louisville had 5 special sessions: Battlefield Acoustics, W. C. Kirkpatrick Alberts and Gregory Lyons. On His 100th Birthday, Isadore Rudnick Speaks for Himself, Jay Maynard Nonlinear Acoustics for Non-Specialists, Won-Suk Ohm and Kent Gee Acoustofluidics, Max Denis, Kedar Chitale, and Charles Thompson Infrasound, Roger Waxler and Philip Blom. At the Louisville meeting, a PA subcommittee was formed, to oversee the JASA reflections initiative. Committee members are Jay Maynard, Carr Everbach, Larry Crum PASS 2018 was a success! It was held at The University of Mississippi, June 3-8, 2018. 32 students from 18 universities (from US, UK, and China) attended. Lectures were presented by Greg Swift (thermoacoustics), Preston Wilson (bubbles), Mark Hamilton (nonlinear acoustics), Tonya Khokhlova (biomedical), Roger Waxler (infrasound), Veerle Keppens (solid state), and Scott Sommerfeldt (active noise control).

Veerle M. Keppens
Chair, 2017-2020

Physical Acoustics website

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Psychological and Physiological Acoustics

This report covers the activities of the Technical Committee on Psychological and Physiological Acoustics (PPTC) from June 2018 through May 2019, which includes the Victoria meeting in November 2018 and the Louisville meeting in May 2019.

The fall meeting is generally less well attended by PPTC, due to the decision to focus on the Spring meeting, except in unusual circumstances such as international meetings. Victoria, BC was both an international meeting and a location near many members in the Pacific NW, who were eager to take advantage of the first meeting in their region since Seattle 2011. As a result, four special sessions were organized, including an outreach session that was associated with a technical initiative to bring three junior investigators who integrate behavioral and physiological and/or anatomical techniques to probe questions of how neural processes relate to auditory perception and perceptual deficits. The session was very successful and will be repeated in the future. Roughly 50 members of PPTC were present at the Victoria TC meeting.

The Spring meeting in Louisville was very well attended by PPTC, with over 100 people at the TC Meeting. Six special sessions were presented, including an outreach to students from clinical and physiological acoustics, which was associated with a technical initiative to pay some of the costs of attendance. One criticism of the meeting was that no podium sessions were organized based on submitted abstracts. Future meetings will be sure to include such sessions to ensure that new work is highlighted. There was also a criticism regarding the number of male speakers in the podium sessions. This will be included as an evaluation criterion in future special session review processes. A form explaining the review criteria and allowing proposers to address them will be used in the future. The following PPTC members were elected in May 2019: Magdalena Wojtczak, Pavel Zahorik, Yi Shen, Erol Ozmeral, Jungmee Lee, Deniz Baskent. Their terms will start after the Chicago meeting in May 2020 and will run until after the Spring meeting in 2023.

At the Louisville meeting, Glenis Long was awarded the 2019 William and Christine Hartmann Prize in Auditory Neuroscience and Barbara Shinn-Cunningham was awarded the 2019 Helmholtz-Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal. The following people associated with PPTC were elected ASA Fellows in 2018: Brian F. Katz, Catherine L. Rogers, Lori Leibold, Rajka Smiljanic, Edward J. Walsh.

ASA Leadership will include the following PPTC members in the coming year: Diane Kewley-Port (President-Elect), Peggy Nelson (Vice-President), Brian C.J. Moore (Executive Council). The following will serve as ASA Committee chairs and/or PPTC ex officio members: William Hartmann (Chair, Rules and Governance), Elizabeth Strickland (Chair, Membership), Marjorie Leek (Outgoing Chair, Membership). Ex officio: Lori Leibold (Membership), Andrew Oxenham (Awards and Medals), Daniel Guest (Student Council), Skyler Jennings (Committee on Standards). The following have served or are newly appointed in 2019 as Associate Editors of JASA, JASA Express Letters, and Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics: JASA: J.G.W. Bernstein, L.R. Bernstein, H.M. Bharadwaj, M.J. Goupell, K.S. Helfer, S. Verhulst, C.A. Shera, J. Braasch, M. Dietz, P.X. Joris, J.J. Lentz, B.L. Lonsbury-Martin, G.C. Stecker, A.K.C. Lee (Coordinating Editor); JASA EL: C. Bergevin, M. Chatterjee, B.L. Lonsbury-Martin, Q.-J. Fu; POMA: H. Patra

PPTC is grateful to these members and to all the others who serve ASA on committees and Task Forces.

Frederick M. Gallun

Chair, 2017-2020

Psychological and Physiological Acoustics website

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Signal Processing in Acoustics

The Technical Committee on Signal Processing in Acoustics (TCSP) concludes a productive year highlighted by a wide-ranging set of special sessions addressing various signal processing challenges faced in acoustics. A sincere thank you goes out to Paul Gendron of Univ. of Massachusetts Dartmouth for his excellent service as Chair of this Committee for the previous 3 years.

At the Fall 2018 Meeting in Victoria, Canada we hosted three special sessions: “Machine Learning for Acoustic Applications” was organized by Peter Gerstoft of SIO Marine Physics Lab and Weichang Li of Aramco Research Center and featured 11 invited talks and 15 contributed talks on a popular and emerging technique in acoustics research. “Detection and Tracking of Mobile Targets” was organized by Siu Kit Lau of the National Univ. of Singapore and Kainam Wong of Hong Kong Polytechnic Univ. and featured 11 invited talks and 11 contributed talks on another popular signal processing topic. “Geometric Signal Processing in Acoustics” was organized by Ananya Sen Gupta of the Univ. of Iowa and Jeffrey Rogers of Naval Research Laboratory and featured 4 invited talks and 3 contributed talks. Our Victoria Technical Program organizers were Kainam Wong, Kai Gemba of the Univ. of California San Diego, and Paul Hursky of Sonar-synesthetics.

At the Spring 2019 Meeting in Louisville we hosted two special sessions: “Bayesian Inference in Acoustical Signal Processing” was organized by Ning Xiang of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Zoi-Heleni Michalopoulou of New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Paul Gendron and featured 8 invited talks and 1 contributed talk. “Borehole Logging Acoustics” was organized by Said Assous of Weatherford and Lee Culver of Penn State and featured 5 invited talks and 2 contributed talks. Our Louisville Technical Program organizers were Lee Culver and Ryan Harne of Ohio State Univ.

Our Young Presenter Award for Victoria and Louisville were organized and lead by Jeff Rogers. The following presentations were recognized from the Victoria Meeting: Tyler Flynn of Univ. of Michigan for “Two-dimensional high-resolution acoustic localization of distributed coherent sources for structural health monitoring,” and Mylan Cook of Brigham Young Univ. for “Using coherence to improve calculation of active acoustic intensity.” The following presentations were recognized from the Louisville Meeting: Vaibhav Chavali of George Mason Univ. for “Statistical characterization of cross terms in snapshot-averaged multiplicative processors,” and Michael C. Mortenson of Brigham Young Univ. for “Extending Bandwidth for Sound Power Measurements.” Our Technical Committee voted to change our Young Presenter Award into a Best Student Paper Award for future meetings.

The TCSP is currently sponsoring an International Student Challenge Problem with solutions due 30 Sep. 2019 and the winner announced at the Fall ASA meeting in San Diego. The problem and solution requirements are described in the Spring 2019 issue of Acoustics Today (vol 15, issue 1). A copy of the article can be found at https://acousticstoday.org/international-student-challenge-problem-in-acoustic-signal-processing-2019-brian-g-ferguson/. Data files referred to the article are also available for download from https://acousticstoday.org/2019-challenge-files/. The competition is being managed by Brian Ferguson of Australia Department of Defense, Lee Culver, and Kai Gemba.

Our student representative this year has been Michael Rollins of Univ. of Cincinnati. John Buck, Univ. of Mass. Dartmouth represents TCSP before the ASA Committee on Education. James Preisig of JPAnalytics serves as the TCSP representative to the Membership Committee. Ning Xiang serves as representative to the Medals and Awards Committee. Ben Faber of Faber Acoustical serves as TCSP representative to the ASA Committee on Standards. The TCSP website is maintained by Ryan Harne and the site is located at http://tcspasa.org. The TCSP is served by a talented and conscientious group of associate editors and we are immensely grateful for their patience and care this year. We welcome Julian de Rosny of Institut Langevin and Efren Fernandez-Grande of Technical Univ. of Denmark as SP Associate Editors for the JASA, joining Jianlong Li of Zhejiang Univ., Zoi-Heleni Michalopoulou, Karim Sabra of Georgia Tech, and Kainam Wong. Peter Gerstoft serves as our coordinating editor to JASA. Our JASA-EL Associate Editors are Lisa Zurk of Univ. of Washington and Paul Gendron. Our POMA Associate Editors were Ryan Harne, Paul Hursky, and Jeff Rogers.

Several new members were added to TCSP including Ryan Harne, Kai Gemba, Trevor Jerome, Buye Xu, Karim Sabra, Jianlong Li, and Efren Fernandez-Grande. We look forward to our Fall 2019 meeting in San Diego, California. TCSP will continue to lead scientific efforts to advance the theory and methods of inference from ever increasing volumes of acoustic observations.

Brian E. Anderson
Chair, 2018–2021

Signal Processing in Acoustics website

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Speech Communication

This report summarizes activities within the Speech Communication TC between the
Victoria meeting (Fall 2019) and Louisville meeting (Spring 2019).

Term to 2019	Term to 2020	Term to 2021
Tessa C. Bent	Christina C. Akbari	Melissa M. Baese-Berk
Charles B. Chang	Donald Derrick	Mary Ester Beckman
Helen M. Hanson	Terry L. Gottfried	Kelly H. Berkson
Diane Kewley-Port	Lori J. Leibold	Ann R. Bradlow
Shrikanth S. Narayanan	Lucie Menard	Francois-Xavier Brajot
Liran Oren	Emily Myers	Cynthia G. Clopper
Sona Patel	Tyler K. Perrachione	James H. Hillenbrand
Catherine L. Rogers	Megha Sundara	Laura L. Koenig
Christine H. Shadle	Lynne A. Werner	Benjamin R. Munson
Christian E. Stilp		Kanae Nishi
Maureen L. Stone		Gordon J.T. Ramsay
Mark Vandam		Melissa A. Redford
Emily Q. Wang		Ocke-Schwen Bohn
Xinhui Zhou		Keiichi Tajima
		Kristin J. Van Engen
		Kiyoko Yoneyama
Ex officio:
Benjamin R. Munson, member of Membership Committee

Anders Lofqvist, member of Medals and Awards Committee (replaced by Jody Kreiman, starting after the Louisville meeting)
Miran Oh, member of Student Council
Zhaoyan Zhang, member of ASACOS
Other SC TC members supporting the Speech Community include Eric Hunter, who maintains our web page, as well as our Facebook and Twitter accounts and Ann Bradlow who is a member of the Executive Council. Alexander Francis also represents our TC on the ASA Panel on Public Policy. We are excited to have Diane Kewley-Port step into the President elect role in the coming year.
We appreciate the time and energy contributed by our TC members. A special thanks to the TC members who will complete their term of service in June 2019.
Publications: We thanks our active associate editors. Current Associate Editors for JASA are: Speech Production – Susanne Fuchs, Ewa Jacewicz, Ohio State University, Anders Lofqvist, and Zhaoyan Zhang ; Speech Perception – Deniz Baskent, Tessa C. Bent, Megha Sundara, and Benjamin V. Tucker; Speech Processing – Paavo Alku, Carol Y. Espy-Wilson, John H. L. Hansen, and Michael I. Mandel;
Associate Editors for JASA Express Letters are: Speech Production – Marc Garellek, Anders Lofqvist, and Brad H. Story; Speech Perception – Martin Cooke and Rajka Smiljanic; Speech Processing Perception – Douglas D. O'Shaughnessy
Associate Editors for POMA: Kanae Nishi and Catherine Rogers
Technical Program: Over the last year, the Speech TC organized a number of stimulating special sessions on diverse topics (summarized below). These sessions ran very smoothly and were well received by our members. Rajka Smiljanic served as the TPO for the past 2 meetings. Our TC is grateful for the dedication and care she puts into this; it is reassuring to know that SC program planning is in good hands. Our members have also embraced the live-streaming initiative.
At the fall 2018 (Victoria) meeting we sponsored 4 special sessions:
 Coupling Phonetics and Psycholinguistics
o Yue Wang, Ratree Wayland, Ann Bradlow
 Recent advances in experimental, computational, and clinical research in voice production and perception
o Michael Doellinger & Zhaoyan Zhang
 The Sounds of Emotion
o Shae Morgan, Kathrin Rothermich
 Phonetics of under-documented languages
o Benjamin Tucker & Richard Wright
At the spring 2019 (Louisville) we sponsored 3 Special Sessions:
 Acoustic properties of infant- and child directed speech
o Mark Van Dam & Laura Dilley
 Perception of speech directed to Infants and children
o Mark Van Dam & Linda Polka
 Exploring the interface between linguistic processing and talker recognition
o Rachel Theodore & Tyler Perrachione
Student poster competition. Each meeting we pick 2 winners and also provide every student participating in the competition with some feedback from the judges of their poster. The energy poured into this process and the high volume of student entries and judges participating at each meeting demonstrates our strong commitment to high quality research and to student mentorship. The Fall 2018 (Victoria) competition was organized by Wendy Herd, Kelly Berkson, and Marcin Wroblewski; the Spring 2019 (Louisville) competition was organized by Marcin Wroblewski and Laura Dilley. We thank the organizers and many judges who make this work so well.
Awards: No awards were given in Speech Communication this year. Given the workload involved in developing nomination dossiers, the SC TC has formed a sub-committee to work with our representative to the Awards and Medals committee. The committee includes Jody Kreiman (our TC rep), Rajka Smiljanic, Linda Polka and Allard Jongman.
Membership: Two new fellows in Speech Communication was selected this year: Rajka Smiljanic and Cathi Rogers. The SC TC also needs to put more energy into nominating fellows. There is no shortage of deserving candidates in our TC.
Stetson Scholarship: The Review Committee for 2019 included Chair: Rachel Theodore (chair), Tyler Perrachione, Megha Sundara, and Mark Vandam. We thank them for their time and effort in reviewing the applications.

Linda Polka
Chair, 2017-2019
Speech Communication website

Speech Communication website

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Structural Acoustics and Vibration

The Structural Acoustics and Vibration Technical Committee (SAVTC) had a successful and productive year of special sessions sponsored by the committee and hosted Student and Young Presenter competitions at both of the meetings. This annual report covers SAVTC activities and meetings occurring during the one-year 2018-19 period beginning after the Spring 2018 ASA Minneapolis meeting and through the Spring 2019 Louisville meeting. During this period, Robert Koch completed the first year of his 2018-2021 second term as chair of the SAVTC.
The SAVTC extends its gratitude to the many SAVTC members and friends of SAV who actively participate as volunteer lead representatives for numerous ASA committee and editorial activities including, but certainly not limited to:
o Robert Koch (ASACOS);
o James Phillips (Medals and Awards);
o Robert Koch (Membership Committee);
o Ryan Harne (SAVTC Web page);
o Tyler “TJ” Flynn (Student Council, completed term mid-year)
o Colby Cushing (Student Council, started term mid-year)
o Matthew Kamrath (Education in Acoustics Committee);
o Ben Shafer (Student Paper Competition);
o Ben Shafer and Robert Koch (Technical Program Organizers);
o Nicole Kessissoglou (new Coordinating Editor), Li Cheng, Nail Gumerov, Kai Ming Li, Steffen Marburg, Marcel C. Remillieux, Franck Sgard, Nickolas Vlahopoulos, Kuangcheng Wu (JASA Associate Editors for SAV);
o Greg McDaniel, Nickolas Vlahopoulos (JASA Express Letters Associate Editor for SAV);
o Steve Shepard (POMA Editor).
Update: Just following the Spring 2018 ASA Minneapolis meeting, the current term for Brian Anderson ended as an JASA Associate Editor for SAV. As he was also SAVTC’s Coordinating Editor, a lengthy search for a new SAVTC Coordinating Editor to succeed Brain commenced. Recently, with the JASA Editor-in-Chief’s invaluable help, Nicole Kessissoglou was identified and agreed to serve as the new Coordinating Editor for the SAVTC. Thanks very much to both Brian and Nicole for your service!
176th ASA Meeting Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, 5-9 November 2018
At the 176th ASA meeting in Victoria, Canada, SAVTC sponsored the following five special sessions and one General session of contributed papers with a total of 45 papers presented (19 invited, 26 contributed):
• Metamaterials: Chairs, Christina Naify and Alexey Titovich
• Advances in thermoacoustics: Chairs, Matthew Kamrath and Robert Koch
• History of computational methods in structural acoustics and vibration: Chairs, James Phillips, Benjamin Shafer, and John Fahnline
• Utilization of high-speed cameras to measure vibration: Chairs, Micah Shepherd and Trevor Jerome
• Advanced modeling techniques for computational acoustics: Chairs, Kuangcheng Wu, Elizabeth Magliula, and James Phillips
• General Topics in Structural Acoustics and Vibration: Chair, Benjamin Shafer
The TPOM representatives were Benjamin Shafer and Robert Koch.
SAVTC had 6 papers entered in the Best Student and Young Presenter competition at the 176th ASA Meeting. Ben Shafer coordinated the competition and the winners were:
1st Place
Caleb B. Goates, Brigham Young University
A quasi-analytical formulation for acoustic radiation modes of simple curved structures
2nd Place
Mark J. Cops, Boston University
Finite element modeling of fluid-saturated metallic foams from micro-computed tomography
177th ASA Meeting, Louisville, Kentucky, 13-17 May 2019
At the ASA Louisville meeting, SAVTC sponsored the following five special sessions and two General sessions of contributed papers with a total of 70 papers presented (15 invited, 55 contributed):
• Acoustic metamaterials: Chairs, Christina Naify and Alexey Titovich
• Noise and vibration in rotating machinery: Chairs, Robert Koch and Elizabeth Magliula
• Novel damping treatments: Chairs, Ben Shafer, Ben Beck, and Hubert Hall
• Smart materials for acoustics and vibration: Chairs, Katie Matlack and Bogdan Popa
• Vibration reduction for extraordinarily sensitive applications: Chairs, James Phillips and Mohammed Afrough
• General Topics in Structural Acoustics and Vibration I and II: Chairs, Benjamin Shafer and Robert Koch
The TPOM representatives were Benjamin Shafer and Robert Koch.
The winners of the Best Student and Young Presenter competition (29 entrees), well-coordinated again by Ben Shafer, were:
1st Place
Colby W. Cushing, University of Texas at Austin
Measuring anisotropy in underwater inertial metamaterials
2nd Place
Tyler Jake Flynn, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
Data-driven approaches for damage-type classification in vibrating square plates
Two ASA society-level awards given to long-time distinguished members of the SAV Technical Committee at the ASA Louisville meeting should be specifically noted here. First of all, ASA Treasurer and past SAVTC Chair David Feit received the 2019 Distinguished Service Citation Award in recognition of outstanding service to the ASA Society. Secondly, Scott Sommerfeldt, also a past SAVTC Chair, received the 2019 Vice President’s Gavel Award as he just finished up his excellent year of service to ASA serving as its Vice President.
In closing, it must be mentioned that, among other goals, a recent set of priorities of the SAVTC Chair has been to increase the number of new members in the committee and to also try and get younger as a committee as well. This was primarily in response to the declining volunteering and meeting attendance of a number of the more senior members of the committee who are now quite understandably drawing down their society activities after decades of contribution at the highest possible levels in the TC and the Society at large. As a result of this thrust, four new SAVTC members were officially added in 2018 and another five were added to the SAV technical committee membership role in the January 2019 new member request cycle – congratulations and welcome aboard to new 2019 SAVTC members Ryan Harne, Stephanie Konarski, Bogdan Popa, Michael Rose, and Jason Smoker. In addition, all of the recent nine new members have already been actively participating and volunteering for TC tasking, session organizing, etc. Thanks very much to them all for their helpful energy, ideas, and volunteering time!!

Robert M. Koch
Chair, 2015 – 2018, 2018 – 2021
Structural Acoustics and Vibration website

Structural Acoustics and Vibration website

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Underwater Acoustics

This report covers the activities of the Technical Committee on Underwater Acoustics (TCUW) and its members during the period from July 2018 through June 2019.

The 176th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America/2018 Acoustics Week in Canada was held Monday through Friday, 5-9 November 2018 at the Victoria Conference Centre and the Fairmont Empress Hotel, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.  Stan Dosso served as ASA Meeting Chair and Jon Collis served as TPOM Rep. for the Victoria meeting.  TCUW sponsored or co-sponsored the following special sessions: (1) Unmanned Vehicles and Acoustics (chaired by Erin Fischell), (2) Acoustic Vector Field Studies (chaired by Bob Barton & Kevin Smith), (3) Sediment Acoustics – Inferences from forward modeling, direct, and statistical inversion methods (chaired by Charles Holland & Stan Dosso), (4) Biological Effects on Seabed Geoacoustic Properties (chaired by Kevin M. Lee, Megan S. Ballard & Kelly M. Dorgan), and (5) Variability in Shallow Water Propagation and Reverberation (chaired by Todd Hefner & David Dall’Osto).  The student paper award winners were Gabriel R. Venagas (First place for “Geoacoustic properties of seagrass-bearing sediments”) and Alexander Scott Douglass (Second place for “Out-of-band beamforming in shallow water with horizontal arrays”).

The 177th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America was held Monday through Friday, 13–17 May 2019 at The Galt House, Louisville, Kentucky, USA.  DJ Tang served as TPOM Rep.  New fellows were recognized and congratulated:  Megan Ballard (For contributions to shallow water propagation and geoacoustic inversion) and Woojae Seong (For contribution to geoacoustic inversion and ocean signal processing).  The student paper award winners were Brandon M Lee (First place for “Machine learning methods for estimating probability density functions of transmission loss: robustness to source frequency and depth”) and Matthew Charles Zeh (Second place for “Model-data comparison of sound propagation in a glacierized fjord with a variable ice top-boundary layer”).  TCUW sponsored and co-sponsored the following special sessions (lead TC):  (1) Understanding animal song (AB, AO, SP, SC); (2) Finite Difference Time Domain method across acoustics (PA, BA, SA, SP, UW); (3) Acoustofluidics (PA, BA, SA, SP, UW); (4) Reconfigurable arrays for adaptive wave guiding (SP, EA, PA, SA, UW); (5) Bayesian inference in acoustic signal processing (SP, AO, NS, UW); (6) Borehole Logging Acoustics (SP, AO, PA, AS, UW); and (7) Random Matrix Theory in Acoustic Signal Processing (SP, NS, UW).

The chair sincerely thanks the many volunteers who make the activities of TCUW possible.

D. Benjamin Reeder
Chair, 2018-2021

Underwater Acoustics website

2016 -2017 Annual Reports

Technical Committees represent thirteen different areas of acoustics in the Society. Appointments to the Technical Committees take place in January. Members who are interested in being appointed to a technical committee should send a message to  asa@acousticalsociety.org.

Acoustical Oceanography (AO)
Animal Bioacoustics (AB)
Architectural Acoustics (AA)
Biomedical Acoustics (BA)
Engineering Acoustics (EA)
Musical Acoustics (MU)
Noise (NS)
Physical Acoustics (PA)
Psychological and Physiological Acoustics (PP)
Signal Processing in Acoustics (SP)
Speech Communication (SC)
Structural Acoustics and Vibration (SA)
Underwater Acoustics (UW)

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Acoustical Oceanography

This annual report reviews activities of the Technical Committee on Acoustical Oceanography (TCAO) from the 170th and 171st meetings of Acoustical Society of America (ASA) held in Jacksonville, Florida, in fall 2015 and Salt Lake City, Utah, in spring 2016, respectively. It has been a strong year for AOTC, with many well-attended sessions, a number of recipients of prestigious prizes and awards, and a resurgence in the number of student papers presented.

Two well-attended special sessions were organized by the TCAO at the Jacksonville meeting: 1) “Acoustics of High Latitude Oceans,” joint with SP, UW, and AB, chaired by Aaron Thode (Scripps) and co-organized by John Colosi (Naval Postgraduate School), and 2) “Passive-Acoustic Inversion Using Sources of Opportunity,” joint with SP and UW, co-chaired by Karim Sabra (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Kathleen Wage (George Mason University). In addition, there were 3 special sessions that AO co-sponsored: 1) “Direction of Arrival (DOA) Estimation, Source Localization, Classification, and Tracking Using Small Aperture Arrays,” co-sponsored with SP and UW and co-chaired by R. Lee Culver, (ARL, Penn State University) and Geoffrey H. Goldman, (US Army Research Laboratory), 2) “50 Years of Underwater Acoustics under ASA,” co-sponsored with UW, AB, and SP, chaired by David Bradley (Penn State University) and co-organized by John Colosi (Naval Postgraduate School), and 3) “Bioacoustics Research In Latin America,” co-sponsored with AB and co-organized by Juliana R. Moron (Universida de Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil) and Marie Trone (Valencia College). A very-well attended AO Hot Topics talk entitled Hot topics in “cold” acoustical oceanography was presented by Grant B. Deane (Marine Physical Laboratories, Scripps, University of San Diego), complementing the earlier session on the acoustics of  high-latitudes. One of the highlights of this meeting was the 2015 Munk Award Lecture given by Carl Wunsch, an Emeritus Professor of Physical Oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during the Wednesday afternoon plenary session, entitled “Ocean acoustic tomography: Past, present, and maybe future”. The Munk Award is granted jointly by The Oceanography Society, the Office of Naval Research, and the Office of the Oceanographer of the Navy for distinguished research in oceanography related to sound and the sea. There were also an encouraging number of student papers presented, with the first place prize given to Katherine Wolfe, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, for her paper entitled “Optimized extraction of coherent arrivals from ambient noise correlations in a rapidly fluctuating medium, with an application to passive acoustic tomography”, and second place prize given to Graham Warner, from the University of Victoria, for his paper entitled “Environmental inversion using bowhead whale calls in the Chukchi Sea”.

The Salt Lake City meeting was punctuated by the presentation of the 2016 R. Bruce Lindsay Award to Megan S. Ballard, a member of the AOTC, for contributions to underwater acoustic propagation modeling and inversion techniques in acoustical oceanography. The R. Bruce Lindsay Award is presented in the spring to a member of the Society who is under 35 years of age and who has been active in the affairs of the Society and has contributed substantially, through published papers, to the advancement of theoretical or applied acoustics, or both. Also at Salt Lake City, the 2016 Medwin Prize was awarded to Thomas Weber from the University of New Hampshire, also an AOTC member. The prize award lecture will be presented at the Hawaii meeting. The Medwin Prize recognizes the accomplishments of young and mid- career scientists involved in research that addresses the effective use of sound in the discovery and understanding of physical and biological parameters and processes in the sea. The new incoming TCAO chair was announced at Salt Lake City, and a hearty congratulations goes to John Colosi (Naval Postgraduate School). There were three well-attended special sessions organized by the TCAO at the Salt Lake City meeting: “Acoustic Consistency of Ocean Models,” co-sponsored by SP, and organized by Tim Duda (WHOI) and Bruce Cornuelle (Scripps), 2) “Noise Impacts from the Industrialization of the Outer Continental Shelf and High Seas,” co-sponsored by AB, and organized by Michael stocker (Ocean Conservation Research), and 3) “Acoustical Oceanographic Tools for the Study of Marine Ecosystems,”  co-sponsored by AB, and organized by David Barclay (Dalhousie University) and Wu-Jung Lee (Johns Hopkins University). Though the TCAO seems to be generally skeptical of live broadcasting of special sessions, the latter two special sessions were broadcast live and seemed to enjoy strong on-line attendance. In addition, there was a special session on “Sediment Characterization Using Direct and Inverse Techniques,” that AO co-sponsored with SP and UW and which was co-chaired by David Knobles (KSA LLC) and Preston Wilson (University of Texas at Austin). There were again a very healthy number of student papers presented, with the first place prize given to Scott Loranger, from the University of New Hampshire, for his paper entitled “An evaluation of the frequency response of hydrocarbon droplets”, and the second place prize was a tie between Jacquelyn Kubicko, for her paper entitled “Passive ocean acoustic tomography using ships as sources of opportunity recorded on an irregularly spaced free-floating array: A feasibility study”, and Graham Warner, for his paper entitled “Time-difference-of-arrival localization of bowhead whales using asynchronous recorders”.

This report is my last as Chair of the AO Technical Committee. I want to close by thanking the volunteers who made the activities of the AO Technical Committee possible this year. I look forward to continuing to work with the AO Technical Committee and the ASA community more broadly.

Andone Lavery
Chair, 2014-2016

Acoustical Oceanography website

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Animal Bioacoustics

It’s been a busy and productive year at TC AB, with many special sessions at the two ASA conferences (Jacksonville, FL, November 2015; and Salt Lake City, UT, May 2016) and a large number of student presentations. We’ve seen the first sessions being streamed live online—very successfully. The ASA’s Strategic Plan was released and the ASA began starting its implementation by setting up four task forces on which TC AB is, of course, represented.

In Jacksonville, FL, TC AB (co-)hosted sessions on: Comparative Neurophysiology of the Auditory System in Honor of Albert Feng; Acoustics of High Latitude Oceans; Direction of Arrival (DOA) Estimation, Source Localization, Classification, Tracking using Small Aperture Arrays; Soundscape and its Application; Bioacoustics Across Disciplines: Detecting and Analyzing Sounds; Bioacoustics Across Disciplines: Emitting Sound; Bioacoustics Poster Session; 50 Years of Underwater Acoustics under ASA; Avian Bioacoustics; Bioacoustics Research In Latin America; and New Discoveries in Bat Vocal Communication.

We had 21 entries for TC AB student presentation awards. The oral presentation award went to Grace Smarsh, Singing away from home: Song is used to create and defend foraging territories in the African megadermatid bat, Cardioderma cor. The poster presentation award was won by Yumi Saito, Rats became positive or negative states when listening to specific vocalizations.

In Salt Lake City, UT, TC AB (co-)hosted sessions on: Comparative Hearing Honoring Dick Fay; Cetacean Bioacoustics; AB General Poster Session; Effects of Noise on Animals; Airborne Automatic Animal Bioacoustics; Noise Impacts from the Industrialization of the Outer Continental Shelf and High Seas; and Acoustical Oceanographic Tools for the Study of Marine Ecosystems.

Due to this being a smaller meeting than the one before, TC AB had fewer student entries for its student presentation awards, which were won by Adrienne M. Copeland, Relative abundance of sound scattering organisms in the NW Hawaiian islands is a driver for some odontocete foragers; and Marielle Malfante, Automatic fish sounds classification.

Thanks to Ben Taft, our TPOM for both the Jacksonville and Salt Lake City meetings.

Special sessions suggested for future ASA meetings can be found on the TC AB website.

TC AB Technical initiatives that were approved in the past year are student and postdoc travel support to the International Congress of Neuroethology in Montevideo, Uruguay, 2016; to the Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life conference in Dublin, Ireland, 2016; to an Airgun Modeling Workshop in Dublin, Ireland, 2016; to the SeaBASS summer school in Pennsylvania, USA, 2016; to the Listening for Aquatic Mammals in Latin America Workshop, 2016; and to the Animal Acoustic Communication conference in Omaha, Nebraska, 2017.

TC AB is actively involved in the development of acoustic standards. We currently have working groups on Underwater Passive Acoustic Monitoring for Bioacoustic Applications; Description and Measurement of the Ambient Sound in Parks, Wilderness Areas, and Other Quiet and/or Pristine Areas; Noise and Vibration in Animal Laboratory Facilities; and Evoked Potential Testing of Toothed Whale Hearing. Anybody interested in participating, please contact TC AB.

Last but not least, JASA is looking for additional Associate Editors in AB.

Thank you to all the members of TC AB for your support and involvement in the various activities of the ASA.

Christine Erbe
Chair, 2016-2019

Animal Bioacoustics website

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Architectural Acoustics

Once again the Technical Committee on Architectural Acoustics (TCAA) continues its focus on:

1.   A rich diversity and relevance at ASA Conference Events

2.   Outreach and Advocacy in the discipline during and between commences

3.  A steady Focus on Future Growth

…In a manor to promote continuity and organizational vitality.

TCAA Organizational Abstract:

The state of the TCAA is very healthy due to the long history of visionary professionals that have lead passionately over the years.

A key to the health of TCAA is the professional diversity in application ranging from Academic, Research, Consultants, Manufactures, Architects, and more. This diversity provides stability in economically adverse cycles, a rich pool of talent and serving capacity, as well as “full loop” interest from concept and research to application and solution.

Another key to the health and vitality of TCAA is leadership development. The TC develops leadership, experience and continuity by promoting team over point person approach in a verity of important roles. As example the TCAA Chair appoints a secretary to a) assist in the chair’s functions and b) learn the process, procedures and duties of the chair developing an excellent candidate as future chair. We are moving forward to implement a similar continuity model across the Medals & Awards, Members, and other Committees and Subcommittees.

ASA Conference Events

The productivity of ASA members focused on Architectural Acoustics (AA) continues to be reflected in the numerous special sessions, organized by specialists passionate about a topic, and populated by authors generous to advance it.

Spring 2015 Pittsburgh:

The spring 2015 meeting in Pittsburgh; We welcomed 93 attendees in our Technical Committee meeting including a healthy student participation of 22. TCAA sponsored 90 papers across 12 special sessions.

Thank you Robert Keolian and Matthew Poese for serving as General Co-Chairs, Jennifer Miksis-Olds for serving as Technical Program Chair, and Damian Doria & David T Bradley as our Technical Program Organizing Meeting representatives.

Fall 2015 Jacksonville:

The fall 2015 conference in Jacksonville; TCAA sponsored 67 papers and posters across 8 special sessions. A Special thanks to Damian Doria & David T Bradley as our Technical Program Organizing Meeting representatives. The TCAA welcomed 91 attendees in our Technical Committee meeting.

Spring 2016 Salt Lake City:

The spring 2016 meeting in Salt Lake City; We welcomed 101 attendees in our Technical Committee meeting including a healthy student participation. TCAA sponsored 102 papers across 10 special sessions.

Thank you Damian Doria & Ian Hoffman for serving a TPO for this meeting

As one of the only, if not the only TC to have a live, in meeting election for TC Chair, the election was held at the SLC meeting and Congratulations to Erica Ryherd for being elected the new TCAA Chair. As her first act as Chair Erica asked Eric Reuter to serve as TCAA Secretary which Eric graciously accepted to serve.

Outreach and Advocacy efforts took many forms this year:

American Institute of Architects Continuing Education System

The Technical Committee on Architectural Acoustics (TCAA) continues to be a Registered Provider in the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Continuing Education System (CES). The TCAA has developed a standardized introductory short course for architects, called “Architectural Acoustics”. An architect can earn one continuing education unit (CEU) by attending this short course, if it is presented by a qualified member of TCAA. The course covers topics in sound isolation, mechanical system noise control, and finish treatments. The qualifications to be an authorized presenter are: 1) Current ASA member in good standing, 2) Current TCAA member in good standing 3) Has attended the AIA/CES short course, organized and offered periodically at ASA conventions.

Publications from and related to Architectural Acoustics

With special thanks to Erica Ryherd, David Bradley, and Lauren Ronsse the “Worship Space Acoustics: 3 Decades of Design” book has been published. This follows a proven concept as demonstrated most recently in the drama theater book.

Classroom Acoustics information booklets continue to serve as a companion for ANSI S12.60 standard, with architects, educators and parents as the target audiences.

WG44; Members of TCAA joint with TCNoise, have completed the draft of S12.70 Standard for Speech Privacy in Healthcare. The final draft is in review at the time of this report.

The TCAA body is fully engaged and supportive of the Strategic Leadership Plan for the Future.

Our Focus on Future Growth is realized in the following ways:

Students, diversity in application participation, and industry relevance.

Student paper awards

TCAA Student Paper Award competitions continue to run at each biannual ASA conference. We congratulate the following students

Results from Pittsburgh:
1st Place: David Dick, Pennsylvania State University 4pAA12. Evaluation of a three-way omnidirectional sound source for room impulse response measurements

2nd Place: Kelsey Hochgraf, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 4aAA8. Simulation and auralization of a concert hall’s inhomogeneous sound field using finite difference time-domain methods and wave field synthesis

Results from Jacksonville:
1st Place: Coralie A. van Reenen; University of Pretoria “A case study investigation of the indoor environmental noise in four urban South African hospitals” Agenda TCAA Salt Lake City 2016 

2nd Place: K.J. Bodon; Brigham Young University “Development, evaluation, and validation of a high-resolution directivity measurement system for live musical instruments” Continues to be a very active program. Thanks to everyone who helps out with this program, including judges and session chairs.

Lastly, I wish to highlight and thank the key leadership of the relevant committees related to architectural acoustics.

• Archives and History (Vic Sparrow)
• Education (David T. Bradley)
• Medals and Awards (Bennett Brooks)
• Membership (Tony Hoover)
• Standards (Ange Campanella)
•  Student Council (Jay Bliefnick)
• Public Policy (Ken Roy, Nancy Timmerman, David Lubman)
• College of Fellows (Tony Hoover)
• Tutorials (Michelle Vigeant) Also thanks to Sean Browne who has coordinated with Dan and maintained our website.
  The Associate Editors in Architectural Acoustics are Lily Wang, Frank Sgard, Jason Summers , Michael Vorländer and Ning Xiang for JASA, & JASA Express Letters with Lauren Ronsse is our POMA editor. And a special thanks to Erica Ryherd who has served on Women in Acoustics and as the Secretary of our technical committee.

Last a thank you to all the folks who lead and serve on our numerous subcommittees and session organizers. It is a privilege to serve such an amazing group of people.

Kenneth W. Good Jr.
Chair, 2014–2016

Architectural Acoustics website

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Biomedical Acoustics

Biomedical Acoustics website

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Engineering Acoustics

As the new incoming Chair of Engineering Acoustics, I want to thank all the veteran members that made this first effort go as smoothly as it did. It is a lot harder on the speaker side of the podium. Thanks go to the EA members that serve on the various committees:

Student Council, Caleb Sieck
Medals and Awards, Gary Elko
Membership, Steve Thompson
JASA Assoc. Ed, Tom Howarth
Website Update, Roger Richards
ASACOS, Roger Logan
Fall 2015 Jacksonville

The best student paper was given by Ellen Skow of the Georgia Institute of Technology for her paper “Pressure ripple amplification within a hydraulic pressure energy harvester via Helmholtz resonator”.

Engineering Acoustics (EA) sponsored the following sessions:
2aEAb:  Engineering Acoustics: Analysis of Sound Sources

Chair Kenneth M. Walsh
2pEA:  Engineering Acoustics (EA) Analysis of Sound Sources, Receivers, and Attenuators

Chair Kenneth M. Walsh
Spring 2016 Salt Lake City

A series of unforeseeable events ended with me in St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore. Roger Richards did an outstanding job of standing in for me at Salt Lake City.

Engineering Acoustics (EA) sponsored the following sessions:
2aEAb:  Engineering Acoustics: General Topics in Engineering Acoustics I Chair Roger Richards
2pEA:  Engineering Acoustics: General Topics in Engineering Acoustics II

Kenneth J. Walsh
Chair 2016-2019

Engineering Acoustics website

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Musical Acoustics

During 2015-2016 the Technical Committee on Musical Acoustics (TCMU) was chaired by Andrew Morrison. The representatives to the Society committees were: James P. Cottingham, Medals and Awards; Andrew Morrison, Committee on Standards and the Publication Policy Committee; James Beauchamp, Membership; and Martin Lawless, Student Council. Associate editors of the society publications for the area of musical acoustics were Diana Deutsch, Thomas Moore and Joe Wolf (JASA); Diana Deutsch, D. Murray Campbell, and Thomas Moore (JASA Express Letters); and Randy Worland (POMA). The Technical Program Organizing Committee (TPOM) representatives for the two meetings of the ASA were Andrew Morrison (Jacksonville and Salt Lake City). Those appointed or reappointed as TCMU members during the year were: Edgar J. Berdahl, Judith C. Brown, Courtney B. Burroughs, Thomas M. Huber, Wilfried Kausel, Bozena Kostek, Timothy W. Leishman, Daniel O. Ludwigsen, Thomas D. Rossing, Daniel A. Russell, David B. Sharp, Julius O. Smith, William J. Strong, Joe Wolfe, Chris Jasinski, Andrew Miller, and Robert Mores.

At the 170th meeting of the ASA in Jacksonville, FL, Nov 02, 2015 to Nov 06, 2015, the TCMU sponsored two special sessions and one general session. The four special sessions were: Slip-stick musical instrument (Thomas Moore, chair), and Evolution of Historical Instrument from then until now (Whitney Coyle, chair). TCMU cosponsored two sessions: Education in Acoustics and Musical Acoustics: Effective and Engaging Teaching Methods in Acoustics (co-sponsored with EdCom) and Directivities of Musical Instruments and Their Effects in Performance Environments, Room Simulations, Acoustical Measurements, and Audio (co-sponsored with TCAA). Winners of the award for best student papers were Sarah R. Smith and Tim Ziemer.

At the 171st ASA meeting in Salt Lake City, UT, May 23-27, 2016, the TCMU sponsored one general and four special sessions. The special sessions were: Teaching Musical Acoustics all levels all types (Jack Dostal and Martin Lawless, chairs), A session in honor of Bill Strong (Tom Rossing, chair), Voice Registration in Amplified and Unamplified Singing (Ingo Titze, chair), and Pitch, Dynamics, and Vowel Tuning in Choral Voice (Ingo Titze, chair.) TCMU cosponsored a session: Analysis of Vibration Based Musical Instruments (co-sponsored with TCSA). Michael Denison and Mark Rau won the awards for Best Student Papers.
James Cottingham continues to maintain an excellent website for TCMU, which can be accessed at (http://www.tcmuasa.org). It includes links to future meetings, minutes of previous TCMU meetings, annual reports, student paper award winners, and useful links to teaching websites and musical acousticians.

Andrew J. Morrison
Chair, 2014-2017

Musical Acoustics website

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Noise

The Technical Committee on Noise (TCNS) has continued to be active in 2015-2016. Kirill V. Horoshenkov was received as an ASA fellow at the Jacksonville meeting and Kent Gee and Christine Erbe were received as ASA Fellows at the Salt Lake City meeting. Three Young Investigator Awards were given for the Jacksonville meeting to Matthew Kamrath, Brenna Boyd and Matthew Calton and three awards were given in Salt Lake City to Christopher Jasinski, Matthew Calton and Pranav Pamidigantham. The ASA gave the Distinguished Service Citation to Susan Blaeser for dedicated management of the Acoustical Society of America standards program. We wish Susan well and thank her for tremendous service to the TC Noise in developing standards, managing the diverse personalities of standards participants and for representing the Acoustical Society of America and the United States in international standards activities. Susan’s replacement is Neil Stremmel and we look forward to his role in managing standards for the society.

TC Noise notes the passing of our dear colleague, Louis Sutherland on February 23, 2016. Lou was a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). Lou was one of the longest serving members of the international acoustics community and one of the most prolific. In a career lasting over 60 years his main areas of research involved studies of human and structural response to noise, sonic boom and blast, but his contributions to the fields of acoustics and vibration have been much more diverse and have included topics such as atmospheric absorption, aircraft noise measurement and modeling, low-frequency noise, classroom acoustics, and acoustic testing.

This year, one highlight was the inaugural award for the Leo and Gabriela Beranek Scholarship in Architectural Acoustics and Noise Control. Leo and Gabriela have endowed the scholarship to provide for awards over the course of the next ten years to an outstanding candidate in Architectural Acoustics and/or Noise Control. William Murphy (Chair TCN), Kenneth Goode Jr. (Chair TCAA), Damian Doria, and Tony Hoover worked with the Beraneks to develop the application process and to evaluate seven candidates. Andrew Hulva was notified following the Salt Lake City meeting that he had been selected as the recipient of the 2016 Beranek Scholarship.

In addition, TC Noise, TC Architectural Acoustics and TC Engineering Acoustics were informed that the Winker family has endowed the Frank and Virginia Winker Memorial Scholarship for Graduate Study in Acoustics. Christopher Struck, ASA Standards Director, is chairing the scholarship committee and has adapted the materials from the Beranek Scholarship to meet the requirements of the memorandum of understanding with the Winker family. The Acoustical Society is indebted to the leadership of Carl Rosenberg and the ASA Foundation for the management of these important scholarships.

The 170th meeting of the ASA was held in Jacksonville FL. There were 59 noise papers in 7 noise sessions. Eric Reuter chaired the session on Environmental and Community Noise. Brigitte Schulte-Fortkamp, Bennett Brooks co-chaired a session on Soundscape and its Application. Hilary Gallagher and Richard McKinley guided two sessions of explosive discussion on the topic of Damage Risk Criteria for Noise Exposure.  Debate quieted down as Melissa Theis, Elizabeth McKenna, and William Murphy co-chaired a session on The Role of Fit-Testing Systems for Hearing Protection Devices. The session chaired Patricia Davies and Colin Novak provided insight into Thoughts on the Next Generation of ANSI Loudness Standards. Nancy Timmerman, Robert Hellweg, Paul Schomer, Ken Kaliski helped us to navigate the turbulent controversies of Wind Turbine Noise. And finally, Scott Sommerfeldt led a session of a mixture of several papers – the Noise Potpourri.

The 171st meeting of the ASA was held in Salt Lake City, UT. There were 59 noise papers in 8 noise-led sessions. As well, TC Noise cosponsored three sessions in Architectural Acoustics and one session in Animal Bioacoustics. Eric Reuter chaired two sessions on Community Noise. Ben Faber made us smarter in the use of our mobile devices by chairing the session on Acoustic Apps for Noise Measurements. Steve Pettyjohn and James Phillips helped to get us in shape with a session on Noise and Vibration Impacts in Crossfit Training Facilities. The session on Statistical Learning Techniques in Noise Research was chaired by Jonathan Rathsam and Ed Nykaza. Nancy Timmerman, Ken Kaliski, Bob Hellweg, Paul Schomer co-chaired two sessions on Wind Turbine Noise. Finally, Blaine Harker chaired the session on Topics in Noise Control.

Thanks to the following people who have represented TCNS within the ASA during this time:  Ken Cunefare on the Medals and Awards Committee, Alex Case on the Membership Committee, Matt Blevins and Jonathan Weber on Student Council, Rich Peppin on ASACOS (Committee on Standards), Christopher Struck, Standards Chair and Ken Roy on Public Policy. The JASA Associate Editors for Noise have been G. Brambilla, Ben Cazzolato, Sandford Fidell, Kiril Horoshenkov, R. Kirby, Brigitte Schulte-Fortkamp. For the JASA Proceedings of Meetings in Acoustics (POMA) Kent Gee has continued to serve as editor and the Associate Editors are Alan Wall and Alexandra Lobeau.

William J. Murphy
Chair, TC Noise 2014-2018

Noise website

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Physical Acoustics

170th Meeting of the ASA in Jacksonville, FL

Special Sessions for the 170th meeting included: Phononic Metamaterials (Joel Mobley), Acoustic Characterization of Critical Phenomena (Josh Gladden & Veerle Keppens), General Topics in Physical Acoustics I & II (Mike Haberman), Launch Vehicle Acoustics I & II: Acoustics of Launch Vehicles and Supersonic Jets (Kent Gee & Tracianne Neilsen)

This meeting marked the first to include Live Streaming of select sessions as a pilot project. The Acoustic Characterization of Critical Phenomena session was streamed. Comments from remote viewers were generally very positive and some suggestions were incorporated for the next meeting.

The PATC Twitter feed (@ASAcousticsPATC) went live for this meeting. It was quickly recognized that more social media savvy people need to be involved with generating tweets. Volunteers are welcome and can contact Josh Gladden (jgladden@olemiss.edu).

171st  Meeting of the Acoustical Society in Salt Lake City, UT

PATC Special Sessions for the 171st meeting included: Atmospheric Acoustic Phenomena (Jericho Cain, John Paul Abbott), Computational Methods in Physical Acoustics (Amanda Hanford, Keith Wilson), Multiple Scattering (Valerie Pinfield), Vortex Beams and Radiation Torque Physics (Likun Zhang, Philip Marston), Nuclear-powered thermoacoustics (Steve Garrett)

The Live Streaming pilot project expanded from 4 sessions in the 170th meeting to 19 sessions for this meeting. This level is hitting a threshold for the volunteer Task Force to handle.

The new ASA Organization Chart was presented and discussed. There was general agreement that the changes were positive and reflective of the Strategic Plan.

The upcoming Physical Acoustics Summer School was discussed. 24 graduate students representing 16 universities and 4 countries have been accepted. This represents the broadest group of students to attend a PASS and will likely lead to larger applicant pools in the future. Funding PASS remains a challenge and various options are being explored to augment ASA support including charitable donations, Federal support, and corporate support.

The Long Range Sound Symposium will be held in Oxford, MS on Sept. 20-21, 2016 and hosted by the National Center for Physical Acoustics. Roger Waxler (rwax@olemiss.edu) is organizing the meeting.

There was discussion about forming a Computational Acoustics Specialty Group. Researchers in this area cut across a wide range of Technical Committees. To formally create a Specialty Group, 50 members must claim this as their primary research area. This effort is being led by Keith Wilson(David.K.Wilson@erdc.dren.mil) and Amanda Hanford (ald227@psu.edu).

Josh R. Gladden
Chair, 2014-2017

Physical Acoustics website

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Psychological and Physiological Acoustics

The P&P held no special sessions during the fall meeting in Jacksonville but some members of our area traveled to the meeting to attend the Award Ceremony during which Roy Patterson received the Silver Medal Award. Roy chose to receive his award during the fall meeting to make it possible for David Green, one of the P&P greatest researchers who is now retired, to join the celebration.

Our members continued their significant involvement in the Society. The past-President, Judy Dubno, and the past-Vice President, Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, completed their three-year leadership cycle at the conclusion of the spring meeting. Andrew Oxenham is currently a member of the Executive Council.

The spring meeting in Salt Lake City was well-attended by the P&P members. The P&P was the main sponsor of six special sessions: “Approaches to Improve Speech Understanding in Noise” organized by Eric Healy, Ying-Yee Kong, and Tao Zhang, “Acoustic Outreach to Budding Scientists: Planting Seeds for Future Clinical and Physiological Collaborations” organized by Anna Diedesch and Adrian K. C. Lee, “Quantitative Methodology in Both Physiological and Psychophysical Data Analysis Workshop” organized by Daniel McCloy, Ross Maddox, and Hari Bharadwaj, “Beyond the Audiogram: Influence of Supra-threshold Deficits” organized by Agnes Leger, and Christopher Plack, “Lessons from Interrupted Speech: Methods and Models” organized by Valeriy Shafiro, and “Spatial Hearing” organized by Ewan Macpherson. All special sessions met with a great interest and were well received. Two of the special sessions were live-streamed and the comments from P&P members unable to attend the meeting who logged on to remotely participate were very positive.

Alan Palmer (University of Nottingham, UK) was the fourth recipient of the William and Christine Hartmann Prize in Auditory Neuroscience. Alan delivered a fascinating Auditory Neuroscience Prize Lecture entitled “Bridging the chasm: Animal physiology and human psychophysics” mixing a great scientific content with a dose of great British humor. The lecture attracting many more people than the room could hold.

Ian Bruce, Micheal Dent, Karen Helfer, and Christopher Stecker became new Fellows of the Society.

The P&P Technical Committee meeting in Salt Lake City was well attended and was live-streamed. During the meeting, reports were given by the JASA Associate Editors for Psychological and Physiological Acoustics, JASA-EL, and POMA. The following Technical Committee members were thanked for their three-year service on the Committee: Michael A. Akeroyd, Richard L. Freyman, Adrian K. C. Lee, Ruth Y. Litovsky, Ewan A. Macpherson, Dorea R. Ruggles, and Christopher Stecker. The following six members started their three-year term at the meeting in Salt Lake City: Huanping Dai, Karen Helfer, Pamela Souza, Elizabeth Strickland, Sarah Verhulst, Matthew Winn. We also held our annual elections to select new members of the P&P Technical Committee whose term will begin at the meeting in Boston (spring, 2017). The following members were elected: Joshua Bernstein,  Emily Buss, Hari Bharadwaj, Monita Chatterjee, Ross Maddox, Christopher Shera, and Christian Stilp. Many thanks to Ying-Yee Kong and Anna Diedesch for running the elections and counting the ballots during the meeting.

We thank Christopher Brown for being our representative at the remotely-held Technical Program Organizing Meeting (TPOM) for the meeting in Salt Lake City.

We also thank Erica Hegland for maintaining and updating the P&P webpage on the ASA website.

P&P members serve on a number of ASA Committees. Brenda Lonsbury-Martin was nominated by the ASA President, Christy Holland, for the Chair of the Medals and Awards Committee. Judy Dubno became the P&P representative on this committee. Adrian K. C. Lee agreed to be our liaison to the Committee on Education in Acoustics. Adrian also volunteered for the Task Force working on improving the process of publication in JASA and JASA-EL.

We extend special thanks to Anna Diedesch for her excellent service as the P&P representative to the Student Council. Anna’s term ended this spring and our new representative is Kelly Whiteford, a student from the University of Minnesota.

The P&P Technical Committee will continue traditional Technical Initiatives, which include travel support for invited speakers, student receptions, and homepage updating, while also focusing on implementing innovative initiatives such as workshops and satellite meetings facilitating collaborations and attracting new members from underrepresented research areas (clinical, physiological, industry, education) to the Society. Suggestions for uses of P&P Technical Committee funds for new Technical Initiatives are welcome and should be sent to the Chair of the P&P Technical Committee.

Magdalena Wojtczak
Chair, 2014-2017

Psychological and Physiological Acoustics website

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Signal Processing in Acoustics

The Technical Committee on Signal Processing in Acoustics (TCSP) had a very productive year with a wide ranging set of special sessions that attracted much interest and an impressive set of candidates for our Best Young Presenter Awards.

In Jacksonville, diverse issues associated with localizing acoustic sources continued as an important area of inquiry for our community. The meeting brought together researchers in special sessions on “Direction of Arrival (DOA) Estimation, Source Localization, Classification, and Tracking Using Small Aperture Arrays” organized and chaired by Lee Culver (Penn State Univ.)  and Geoffrey Goldman (US Army Res. Lab). The technical challenges that attend some of the most fundamental issues in acoustic detection and estimation were addressed during a special session on “Random Matrix Theory in Acoustics and Signal Processing” organized and chaired by Jim Preisig (JPAnalytics). Jacksonville also saw an abundance of contributed talks in two well attended sessions,  “Detection, Feature Recognition, and Communication” chaired by Geoffrey Edelmann and  “Algorithm, Analysis, and Beamforming” chaired by John Buck (UMassD).

The TCSP was very proud at the Jacksonville meeting to see Brian G. Ferguson, Principal Scientist, Maritime Division, Defence Science and Technology Organization, Australia receive the Acoustical Society of America's Silver Medal in Signal Processing in Acoustics for contributions to in-air and in-water acoustic classification, localization and tracking.

At Salt Lake City we had 4 vibrant special sessions. We saw new and practical research on the topic of “Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Detection, Tracking, and Classification” organized and chaired by Lee Culver and Geoffrey Goldman and a special session on Acoustic Array Systems and Signal Processing organized and co-chaired by Mingsian Bai (National Tsing Hua Univ.) and John Buck (Univ. MA Dartmouth). Signal processing issues associated with matched field processing continued to draw attention with a special session “Comparison of Beamforming, Matched-Field Processing, and Time Reversal Techniques” organized and co-chaired by Brian Anderson (BYU). We also had a special session on issues associated with “Detection and Estimation in Uncertain Acoustic Environments” organized and chaired byPaul Gendron (UMassD). Lastly, Edmund Sullivan (EJS Consultants) and Brian Anderson chaired a “General Topics in Signal Processing” session bringing together a nice set of acoustic signal processing contributions.

The TCSP sponsored the 16thGallery of Acoustics (GoA)  event in Salt Lake City. The GoA provides an open forum forresearchers to display novel and aesthetically inspiring acoustical phenomena. The event emphasizes the interdisciplinary, and sometimes even artistic nature of acoustics. The GoA was organized by Michael Muhlestein (UT Austin) and TCSP members served to judge and rank the contributions. This year's first place winner was Brent Reichman with his “Acoustics in Flight” display. The second place winner was Claire Pincock with her “Visual Directivity” display.

The TCSP continues to sponsor its Best Young Presenter Award with a diverse and talented group of contestants this year. The winner of the 170th Meeting was Atulya Yellepeddi (MIT) with his presentation “The surprising sample covariance matrix: Unexpected characteristics and understanding them“. The winner at the 171th Meeting in Salt Lake City was Christopher Verlinden (UCSD) for his presentation “Extrapolation of measured correlation replica fields in passive acoustic source localization“. Each winner received an award of $500. Due to the quality and breadth of presentations this year we recognized a number of runner up presentations; Michael-Thomas Ramsey (Nottingham Trent Univ) was recognized for his presentation “Automated detection of honeybee begging signals from long term vibration monitoring of honeybee hives” (170th meeting), Sarah M. Young (BYU), for her presentation “ ‘Knocked Over!’: A visual demonstration of time reversal focusing using bending waves in a thin plate” (171st Meeting) and Danielle Lynd, (OSU), “Acoustic beamfolding, new potentials enabled by interfacing reconfigurable origami and acoustic structures” (171st Meeting). We are very proud of the student presenters that continue to enliven the TCSP and are willing to undergo the scrutiny that attends competing in this challenging environment.

TCSP is thankful for the conscientious service of Ning Xiang (RPI) and Said Assous (Univ. Weatherford) as Technical Program Organizers for the Jacksonville and Salt Lake City meetings. Many technical and logistic considerations need to be taken into account to ensure a successful meeting and we are indebted to their care and energy. We welcomePaul Hursky (HLS) as the TCSP Associate Editor for the Proceedings of the Meetings on Acoustics. Paul replaces Sean Lehman. We are also pleased to have John Buck represent the TCSP before the ASA Committee on Education. James Preisig continues to serve as the TCSP representative to the Membership Committee while Edmund Sullivan continues as our representative to the Medals and Awards Committee. Ben Faber (Faber Acoustical) will serve as TCSP representative to the ASA Committee on Standards. Ben replaces Charles Gaumond (Aria)  in this role. Charles is a former TCSP chair and a cherished mentor to many TCSP members. The TCSP website has been exceptionally maintained by Brian Anderson. In Salt Lake City the TCSP was pleased to establish Jeff Rogers (NRL) as the new organizer for the Best Young Presenter in Signal Processing Competition. Jeff replaces Philippe Moquin, who ably served in this role for the past 3 years.

The TCSP is ably served by a talented and conscientious group of associate editors and we are immensely grateful for their patience and careful service this year. The Associate Editors for JASA are Patrick, Loughlin (Univ. of Pittsburgh),  Zoi-Heleni (Eliza) Michalopoulou (New Jersey IT), Karim G. Sabra (Georgia IT) and Kaiman Thomas Wong. Our JASA-EL Associate Editors are Dave Chambers (LLNL) and Charles Gaumond.

We are genuinely excited and eagerly look forward to a wide ranging set of specials sessions that are presently being planned for the coming year's joint meetings with the Acoustical Society of Japan and the European Acoustics Association.

Paul Gendron
Chair, 2015–2018

Signal Processing in Acoustics website

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Speech Communication

Several of these members are new to the TC. I welcome them heartily and thank them in advance for their support of our TC's efforts.

Other STC members who assisted us by serving on committees were Suzanne E. Boyce-Membership Committee, Anders Lofqvist-Medals and Awards Committee, Dominique Bouavichith-Student Council Representative, Zhaoyan Zhang – Standards Committee, and Eric Hunter who maintains our web page, as well as our Facebook and Twitter accounts. Ann R. Bradlow is a member of the Executive Council. I also thank Sarah Hargus Ferguson and Rachel Theodore for taking detailed minutes at the Jacksonville and Pittsburgh meetings. Furthermore, several members of the Speech Communication Technical Committee are also participating actively in the implementation of the ASA Strategic Plan, including Ann R. Bradlow and Tessa Bent.

I, Catherine Rogers (University of South Florida), will serve as the chair of SC through the end of the Spring, 2016 meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Linda Polka will serve as chair of the Speech Communication Technical Committee, starting at the conclusion of the Spring, 2016 meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Associate Editors of JASA are: Speech Perception- Deniz Baskent, Tessa Bent, Cynthia G. Clopper, James M. Hillenbrand, Anders Lofqvist, Benjamin R. Munson, Peggy B.  Nelson, and Mitchell S. Sommers; Speech Production -David A. Berry, Laura L. Koenig, Brad H. Story, and Zhaoyan Zhang; Speech Processing-Carol Y. Espy-Wilson, Mark A. Hasegawa-Johnson and Shrikanth Narayanan. Associate Editors for JASA Express Letters are: Speech Perception- Ann Cutler and Sandra Gordon-Salant; Speech Production-Anders Lofqvist, and Speech Processing-Douglas D. O’Shaughnessy. The Associate Editors for Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (POMA) are Peter J. Watson and Eric J. Hunter. We thank all the Associate Editors for their service.

The two ASA meetings went very smoothly this year. We are grateful to our Technical Program Organizing Meeting (TPOM) representative, who sorted papers, arranged the technical programs, and determined presentation rooms. The representative was Alexander Francis for both the Jacksonville and Pittsburgh meetings. The ASA has successfully transitioned to an online organizing meeting, and Alexander Francis has served in that capacity since the start of the process. His service in this regard has been invaluable.  In addition, Richard Morris served as the General Chair and I, Catherine L. Rogers, served as Technical Program co-Chair (with Judy R. Dubno) for the Jacksonville meeting.

To create stimulating and focused sessions, we sponsor special sessions every year, which focus on themes of interest to the speech community. The Jacksonville meeting had two special sessions sponsored by the Speech Communication Technical Committee: one organized by Cynthia Clopper entitled “Advancing methods for analyzing dialect variation” and a special session organized by Mary Beckman and Valerie Hazan entitled “Development of Speech Production (and Perception) across the Lifespan.”

The Pittsburgh meeting had two special session sponsored by the Speech Communication Technical Committee on topics related to the both speech perception and speech production and one (coplanned) jointly sponsored special session: a named special session in honor of Ken Stevens, entitled “Celebration of Kenneth N. Stevens’ Contributions to Speech Communication: Past, Present, Future,” organized by Stephanie Shattuck-Hufnagel and Helen Hanson, and a special session entitled “Listening Effort,” organized by Alexander Francis and Christian Fullgrabe; Catherine Rogers participated in the organization of a named special session in honor of Karl Kryter, co-sponsored by several TCs, entitled “Sixty-Fifth Anniversary of Noise and Health: Session in Honor of Karl Kryter II.”

The Speech Communication Technical Committee has also participated in the recent development of live streaming of a limited number of sessions, which began at the Jacksonville meeting and is continuing.

Stetson Scholarship. The SCTC also evaluates the Stetson Scholarship applications. The awardees for 2015 were Katherine M. Dawson (Graduate Center for the City University of New York) and Matthew I. Lehet (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh). The review committee was composed of the following persons in 2015: Suzanne Boyce, Kate Bunton, Rachel Theodore, Amy Neel and Stefan Frisch.

Silver Medal in Acoustics.  For nominations for the Silver Medal in Acoustics to be forwarded to the Medals and Awards committee, four complete dossiers are required. In 2015, four full dossiers were complete and the committee met to discuss and rank the applicants. The committee consisted of the current SCTC chair and the two previous chairs: myself (Catherine Rogers), Benjamin Munson and Carol Espy-Wilson. John Ohala was awarded the Silver Medal in Acoustics at the Jacksonville Meeting (fall 2015) of the Acoustical Society of America.

Student Activities In our continuing effort to promote student participation in ASA meetings, the Speech Technical Committee sponsored two student activities at each meeting, a competition with a cash award for best student poster and evening receptions in Jacksonville and Pittsburgh. In Jacksonville (Fall 2015), the winner was Cynthia Blanco ($300), University of Texas at Austin, and second prize went to Sarah Hamilton, University of Cincinnati. In Pittsburgh, the winner was Dominique Simmons, University of California, Riverside ($300) and the second prize was William Bologna, University of Maryland ($200).

The student reception, which is joint with other technical committees, is intended to allow students to meet more senior ASA members informally. The receptions were well attended.

The student papers were judged by SCTC members. We thank Dan Fogerty, Jennell Vick, and Patrick Reidy for coordinating this competition for the Pittsburgh and Jacksonville meetings.

Revision to Student Paper competition. As stated in the previous report, the Speech Communication TC changed the Best Student Paper competition to a poster only (rather than poster or oral paper presentation) competition. This was begun at the Pittsburgh meeting. The wording in the call for papers was changed to make it clear that only poster presentations would be considered for the Best Student Paper competition.  The organizers of the judging noted that the process did seem easier and fairer when only poster presentations were considered.

Catherine Rogers
Chair 2013-2016

Speech Communication website

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Structural Acoustics and Vibration

The Structural Acoustics and Vibration Technical Committee (SAVTC) had a successful year of special sessions sponsored by the committee and hosted Student and Young Presenter competitions at all of the meetings. This annual report covers SAVTC activities and meetings occurring during the one-year 2015-16 period beginning after the spring 2015 ASA Pittsburgh meeting.

James Phillips ended his three-year term as SAVTC chair at the conclusion of the Pittsburgh meeting and was relieved by Robert Koch who then began his 2015-2018 term as chair of the SAVTC. The SAVTC thanks James for his excellent and active work as chair during 2012-2015.

The SAVTC also extends its gratitude to the many SAVTC members who actively participate as volunteer lead representatives for numerous ASA committee and editorial activities including, but certainly not limited to:

• Robert Koch (ASACOS);
• Sabih Hayek and James Phillips (Medals and Awards);
• Kai Ming Li (Membership Committee);
• Brian Anderson (SAVTC Web page);
• Matthew Kamrath (Student Council and Education in Acoustics Committee);
• Ben Shafer (Student Paper Competition);
• Robert Koch and Ben Shafer (Technical Program Organizers);
• David Feit, Linda Franzoni, Jerry Ginsberg, Andrew Hull, Kai Ming Li, Elizabeth Magliula, Greg McDaniel, Earl Williams, Tribikram Kundu  (JASA Associate Editors for SAV);
• Greg McDaniel (JASA Express Associate Editors for SAV).

170th ASA Meeting, Jacksonville, Florida, 2-6 November 2015

At the 170th ASA meeting in Jacksonville, Florida, SAVTC sponsored the following five special sessions and one session of contributed papers with a total of 40 papers presented (22 invited, 18 contributed):

• Nonlinear Techniques for Nondestructive Evaluation: Chair, Brian Anderson
• Transient Nearfield Acoustical Holography: Chair, Nicolas Valdivia
• Structural Acoustics and Vibration in Buildings: Co-chairs, James Phillips and Ben Shafer
• Flow-Induced Vibration: Chair, Robert Koch
• Novel Treatments in Vibration Damping: Chair, Ken Cunefare
• General Topics in Structural Acoustics and Vibration: Chair:  Ben Shafer

The TPOM representative was Robert Koch.

SAVTC had 5 papers entered in the Best Student and Young Presenter competition at the 170th ASA Meeting. James Phillips coordinated the competition and the winners were:

1st Place
David Torello, Georgia Institute of Technology, Characterization of air-coupled ultrasonic receivers for nonlinear Rayleigh wave nondestructive evaluation

2nd Place
Ryan Salmon, Georgia Institute of Technology, Solid-liner suppressor design, construction, and development

One committee member was presented an award at the Jacksonville Meeting:

Allan D. Pierce – recipient of the Distinguished Service Citation “for his excellent service to the Acoustical Society of America, and especially for his 15 years of service as Editor-in-Chief”

Following Robert Koch’s 2015 election as SAVTC chair, Ben Shafer agreed to replace him as the on-line Technical Program Organizer (TPO) for SAVTC for the next two years, beginning at the 171st Jacksonville meeting.

A Technical Initiative in the amount of $500 was proposed and approved by the Technical Council at the ASA Jacksonville meeting to support Brian Anderson for SAVTC Website maintenance for each of the years 2016 and 2017.

171st ASA Meeting, Salt Lake City, Utah, 23-27 May 2016

Fellow member Brian Anderson represented the SAVTC committee well as Technical Program Co-chair of the 171st ASA Salt Lake City, Utah meeting.

At the ASA Salt Lake City meeting, SAVTC sponsored the following six special sessions and one session of contributed papers with a total of 43 papers presented (20 invited, 23 contributed):

•     Wavenumber Transform Methods: Chair, Micah Shepard

•     Building Isolation from Seismic and Ground-Borne Vibration: Co-Chairs: James Phillips and Hasson Tavossi

•     Nuclear-Powered Thermoacoustics: Co-Chairs: James Phillips and Hasson Tavossi

•     Real-World Instructive Case Studies in Structural Acoustics and Vibration: Co-Chairs: Robert Koch and Elizabeth Magliula

•     Computation Methods in Structural Acoustics and Vibration: Chair: Robert Koch

•     Analysis of Vibration Based Musical Instruments: Co-chairs:  Dan Russell & Brian Anderson

•     General Topics in Structural Acoustics and Vibration: Chair:  Ben Shafer

The TPOM representative was Benjamin Shafer.

The winners of the Best Student and Young Presenter competition (out of 12 entrees), coordinated by Ben Shafer, were:

1st Place
Peter Kerrian, Penn State University, The problem of the noisy golf club

2nd Place
Pegah Aslani, Brigham Young University, Experimental active control of cylindrical shells using the weighted sum of spatial gradients control metric

The Salt Lake City meeting represented Matt Kamrath’s last meeting as SAVTC Student Council representative. Tyler “TJ” Flynn has been elected to replace Matthew for the next term as Student Council rep. The SAVTC extends our gratitude and thanks to Matthew for his excellent service to the SAVTC and we look forward to continuing his involvement with the committee going forward in exciting new ways.

Robert M. Koch
Chair, 2015 – 2018

Structural Acoustics and Vibration website

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Underwater Acoustics

This report covers the activities of the Technical Committee on Underwater Acoustics (TCUW) and its members during the period from July 2015 through June 2016.

The 170th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America was held at the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront Hotel in Jacksonville, Florida, 2 – 6 November 2015. TCUW sponsored the following four sessions: “50 Years of Underwater Acoustics under the ASA” co-chaired by David L. Bradley and John A. Colosi with seven invited talks and one contributed talk, “Environmental Variability on Shallow Water Acoustics I and II” co-chaired by Brian Hefner, Anthony Bonomo, Kevin Heaney, and Sergio Jesus with four invited talks and 23 contributed talks, and “Communications, Transducers, Target Response, and Nonlinear Acoustics” co-chaired by Raymond Lim and Simon Freeman with 13 contributed talks. The student paper award winners were Brian Worthmann and Dieter Bevans who tied for first place.

The 171st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America was held at the Salt Lake Marriot Downtown at City Creek Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah, 23 -27 May 2016. TCUW sponsored the following six sessions: “Target Physics and Scattering” chaired by Brian Hefner with 11 contributed talks, “Sediment Characterization Using Direct and Inverse Techniques I, II, and III” co-chaired by David Knobles and Preston Wilson with 13 invited talks and 13 contributed talks, “Acoustic Propagation in the Ocean” chaired by Ying-Tsong Lin with nine contributed talks, and “Underwater Noise” chaired by Stan Dosso with nine contributed talks. Megan Ballard received the R. Bruce Lindsay Award for contributions to underwater acoustic propagation modeling and inversion techniques in acoustical oceanography. The student paper award winners were Viktor Bollen and Michael Bianco who received first and second place, respectively.

The chair thanks the many volunteers who make the activities of TCUW possible.

Megan S. Ballard
Chair, 2015-2018

Underwater Acoustics website